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https://archive.org/details/senseofhumorOOeast 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 



THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


BY 

MAX EASTMAN 

AUTHOR OF “ENJOYMENT OF POETRY,'* “COLORS OF LIFE— POEMS AND 
SONGS AND SONNETS,” ETC. 


NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 
1922 


Copyright, 1921, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 


Printed in the United States of America 


Published November, 1921 



2oW 

£ a 1 s 


\ O Ql Si 

l S UN 


NJ 




TO FLORENCE DESHON 



v£ : 


1 V 





PREFACE 


Although I have tried to make this book enjoy- 
able, and keep it alive to the qualities of its subject, 
my prevailing purpose has been scientific. So far as 
the present technique of psychology permits of solu- 
tions, I have tried to solve the problem of humorous 
laughter. And if I have taken one valid step toward 
that solution, it will please my purpose better than 
any amount of the success that might be called literary. 

The relation between science and the literature of 
generalities seems to me to be one of the great prob- 
lems of the future. For science is developing so tech- 
nical and special a body of knowledge upon every sub- 
ject under the sun, that only an expert can know any- 
thing substantial of what is to be known about it. 
And yet literary men with no real training in science 
continue to pretend that they know something, if not 
everything, about all subjects. They write essays 
upon general problems with the same free joy of self- 
expression with which they write stories or poems 
about particular things or experiences. And these 
essays, while they may stimulate the reader and give 
him a fine sense of mental companionship, are very 
likely to be in flat contradiction to some method or re- 
sult that scientific men have already humbly and con- 
scientiously verified — in which case they certainly be- 
long to the second and not the first order of human 
values. The attitude of Carlyle toward Darwin’s dis- 

vii 


Vlll 


PREFACE 


coveries is an example in point, and Nietzsche’s ama- 
teur views on heredity at the very basis of his gospel 
of the Superman, and the light manner in which men 
like H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw, and at one time 
Maxim Gorki, while professing to be scientific social- 
ists, have dismissed or miscomprehended the Marxian 
theories of history. 

This may seem a remote opening for a book about 
humor, but it happens that the problem of humor has 
always been a special field of play for the irresponsible 
essay-writer, and the literature that adorns it is no- 
toriously inconsequential. When I told Bernard Shaw 
that I was writing this book, he advised me to go to 
a sanitarium. “There is no more dangerous literary 
symptom,” he said, “than a temptation to write about 
wit and humor. It indicates the total loss of both.” 
And with a proper emphasis upon the word literary, 
that is entirely true. But if technical science con- 
tinues to develop as it has in the last half-century, and 
men of letters continue not to develop, it will soon be 
true that there is no more dangerous literary symptom 
than a temptation to write about any problem of gen- 
eral knowledge. People will take our Plays seriously, 
but not our Prefaces — not our essays, epigrams, and 
immortal disquisitions. These they will glance 
through with an indulgent smile, and then go look the 
thing up in a laboratory report and find out what the 
truth is. 

The problem of scientific as opposed to “literary” 
knowledge will have to be solved. And in as much as 


PREFACE 


ix 


scientific knowledge happens upon the whole to be cor- 
rect, I can see no way to solve it, except for the literary 
people to go to work. Of this gentle revolution I have 
tried to give a small example in the present book. 

In the First Part I have stated my own theory as to 
what humor is, and I have shown its application to 
the various kinds of things we laugh at. In the Second 
Part I have given an account of the historic attempts 
of mankind to explain humor and state the causes of 
laughter. I have classified these attempts and criti- 
cised them from the standpoint of my own theory, but 
I have tried to make my account generous enough so 
that the reader who wishes to experiment or think 
further can find here all the leading ideas that others 
might contribute to his effort. In the concluding 
chapter I have treated my own theory in somewhat 
the same way as the rest, showing its relation to them 
and to the existing psychology of the emotions. 

The Second Part is written mainly for purposes of 
historic reference and technical argument, and will 
not perhaps interest the general reader. It is folly, 
at any rate — in this day of the newspaper, the maga- 
zine, pamphlet, sign-board, prospectus, and the general 
onward rush for nowhere — for an author to pretend 
that people are really going to sit down and read his 
book. I therefore extend my benediction and gratitude, 
and the permission to say that he has read my book, to 
any one who will finish Part I and read the last chapter 
of Part II. He will know all the affirmative things I 
have to say about humorous laughter. 




CONTENTS 


PART I 

THE SENSE OF HUMOR 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Laughter of Pleasure 3 

II. Laughter of Playful Pain 11 

III. Elementary Humor 20 

IV. Jokes with a Point 27 

V. Humor and Hostility 32 

VI. Humor and Sexuality 38 

VII. Humor and Truth 42 

VIII. The Humor of Quantity 49 

IX. Practical Humor 58 

X. Poetic Humor 72 

XI. Good and Bad Jokes 86 

PART II 

THEORIES OF HUMOR 

I. The Greek Philosophers 123 

II. The Agnostic Attitude 130 

III. The Derision Theory 136 


xi 


Xll 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGE 

IV. The Disappointment Theory 152 

V. The Discovery of Benign Humor .... 165 

VI. The Mechanical Theory 175 

i 

VII. Laughter as Liberty 184 

VIII. Freud’s Contribution 190 

IX. The Discovery of Merry Laughter . . . 206 

X. Conflict-Mixture Theories 211 

XI. Humor as Instinct 224 

Notes and References 237 


PART I 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 








CHAPTER I 

LAUGHTER OF PLEASURE 

With almost every new system of philosophy there 
comes a magical explanation of laughter as a kind of 
side-show. A portion of the apparatus is removed 
from the main tent, a slight relaxation of intelligence 
is permitted, and a number of tamed witticisms are 
ushered in, and go through their paces in a mechani- 
cal way, or simply slink around and refuse to be humor- 
ous upon exhibition. The result is a mood of strained 
mercy and embarrassment very little akin to the sym- 
pathy of true understanding. I think the error in this 
procedure is to regard the explanation of laughter as 
a side-show, and not a main part of the explanation 
of man. Perhaps there is no room for fun and friendly 
merriment in that small cerebral habitation which 
philosophers call the universe, and so naturally to 
them the problem of laughter appears trivial and 
external, a “pert challenge” to their great powers of 
speculation. But to the more humble observer who 
simply looks out of his window at the daily stream of 
behavior, inquiring of its course, it seems as though 
men and women were always seeking for something or 
anything at which they might smile. And those ex- 
planations which make laughter a mere by-product, of 

3 


4 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


other enterprises — a mechanical accident, a condition 
of release or overflow — seem to give small justice to 
this continual and very dexterous accomplishment that 
distinguishes man and raises him a little above the 
less amiable animals. 

Laughter is, after speech, the chief thing that holds 
society together. It seems to be an intrinsic part of 
the gregarious instinct in men, signifying that they are 
something more than merely restive in solitude, and 
desirous to stand alongside of their kind and chew, 
signifying that to be with others is for them action and 
vivid employment of their nature. A smile is the uni- 
versal welcome, and laughter is a greeting that we may 
give to any arriving friend. It is a definite affirma- 
tion of hospitality and delight. To laugh is to say 
“Yes.” It is to say “Good !” “I agree to your emo- 
tion!” “I am happy to see you!” A smile is the 
path along which two selves approach, and not to 
smile is to declare off the meeting explicitly. 

Perhaps some mechanical accident might explain 
why this instinct flows out in just these good wrinkles 
and gusts of amiability, and not in some other mode 
of action. We can imagine that we might have ac- 
complished the same thing more quietly with our ears, 
as we see that dogs accomplish it with their tails. But 
if we consider the handicap they suffer in conversation, 
and observe how they fold themselves half-double in 
a vain effort to bring forward that rear-end cordiality 
into the main scene of action, we shall be inclined to 
acknowledge a social utility even in the forms of human 


LAUGHTER OF PLEASURE 


laughter. The need for an expression which should be 
luminous, and should mingle readily with speech and 
vision, may well have been the determining factor in 
its evolution. A smile is a moving summary of the 
chief points of personality. It is so complete and so 
delicate an employment of the features that medical 
doctors rely upon it to reveal the least trace of a facial 
paralysis when all the other expressions appear normal. 
And laughter is but an addition of breath and voice 
and gesture to this already complicated act. The two 
can not be distinguished either physically or in the fun- 
damental qualities of feeling involved. Those who have 
attempted this have neglected to observe that every 
one who laughs is still smiling. The celebration is 
single and continuous as it is complex and delicate. 
It is a celebration of social pleasure, a blessing without 
which our lives would be but the spare outline of what 
they are. 

In Charles Fourier this pleasure was so dominant 
that he believed a law of “social attraction” could play 
the same role in political science as the law of gravi- 
tation in physics. And as a natural symptom of that 
excessive state of feeling, we learn that Charles Fourier 
never smiled. It is usually through such an inhibition 
of our actions that our passions are intensified. And 
that, I suppose, is why we feel so warm a trust in the 
friendliness of those who smile gently, and mostly 
through their eyes, while those who “laugh with the 
lips ” we think are of more use in luck than trouble. All 
the famous moralists of Greece and Rome, and the 


6 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


Hindu sages too, were of the opinion that unrestrained 
laughter is not characteristic of the wise and strong. 
But for my part I think the surest sign of a healthy 
spirit is to see friendly joyfulness pour all over his fea- 
tures, and down into his throat and the muscles of his 
body without bound or hindrance. The smile that fills 
my imagination is one that begins with a flash, because 
the motion of the upper lip comes first and so strongly, 
and yet that lip broadens a little as it rises so that 
while all the teeth shine the mouth is only redder than 
it was — the cheeks curve, and the eyes gather light 
and attract the brows and lashes toward them just 
infinitesimally, warming their vivid glitter with those 
radiant soft lines of good nature and good-will. Such 
living motions are more beautiful than any wine or 
flower or colors in the clouds of heaven, and they are 
almost the source of the light in which men struggle 
through so much pain and blind anxious endeavor to 
the goal of darkness. 

A reason why this so obvious thing has escaped the 
philosophers is that they have not clearly distinguished 
laughter from the curling of the lip in scorn. And 
yet the temper of these two acts is opposite and their 
neural machinery distinct, as may be seen in the fact 
that we laugh with both sides of our face, but most of 
us can sneer only with one. To unflesh an eye-tooth 
and emit short breaths or ha-ha’s against a man’s 
presence, is as far from laughter as the fangs of a 
canine animal are from his tail. It is therefore upon 
good biological and bodily grounds, as well as upon 


LAUGHTER OF PLEASURE 


7 


grounds of feeling, that we dismiss from the topic of 
laughter at the outset the topic of scorn. Not only 
the sneer itself, but all of its disagreeable children, 
dwelling in the words gibe, leer, jeer, scoff, flout, hoot, 
gird, niggle, taunt, the sardonic or cynic probe, and the 
lash of sarcasm, are to be got out of our way at the 
beginning. The word sarcasm means in its origin a 
tearing of the flesh like dogs, and may well be considered 
a function of the teeth rather than of the lips. The 
cynic attitude of wit derives its name ultimately also 
from the dog. And even the word sardonic is plausi- 
bly derived from the Greek, aatpco, used originally 
of animals, and corresponding to our phrase “show 
your teeth.” Deride also, although in origin a word 
of laughter, has gone over to the wolf’s breed, and 
does not describe any of the true family of the smile. 
It is possible, of course, that the feelings indicated in 
these words may mingle with laughter, as may a great 
variety of the moods of men, and give rise to new 
flavors of emotion, but they are none of them involved 
in the essence and generation of laughter itself, which 
is not an act of rejection but of acceptance. It is not 
pain, but pleasure. It is not derision, but delight, as 
any one may convince himself by observing it in the 
cradle at about the fortieth day. For that is the day 
of its birth — and on that day a companion is born. 
And the smile of dawning welcome, there so eventful, 
and so clearly demonstrated to be essential to the very 
warmth and existence of social communion, is the 
native original of all smiles and all laughter. 


8 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


The variety of uses to which this expression is 
subsequently put, may be understood, if we realize how 
profoundly the social instinct and emotion enter into 
and pervade our whole conscious existence. We may 
almost say they are the receptacle in which human 
nature is compounded. It is only in relation to others 
that our own miraculous selves ever could have been 
created. And therefore it is not surprising if these 
selves continue a social bearing even in complete soli- 
tude, and grin into their beer, or chuckle upon the 
arrival of an idea in their minds, or make merry with 
the winds and wild roses blowing over the hill. In- 
deed anything that drops pleasantly and well ripened 
into the lap, having been expected long enough, or 
being sufficiently unexpected to possess an eventful 
character, wffil usually be greeted laughingly by people 
not sitting under the incubus of some dull ideal of 
decorum. And in times of true positive happiness 
almost any stimulus whatever that is not painful will 
awaken a smile. People who are happy laugh oftener, 
indeed, and upon a less special provocation, than do 
people who are sorrowful cry. x\nd therefore it is 
possible to say that laughter, from being a means for 
the communication of social pleasure , has, by a natural 
economy in evolution, become a means for the social 
communication of pleasure, and has acquired almost a 
kind of identity in our nervous systems with the state 
of joy or satisfaction in general. It is a manifestation 
of success and plenitude of life, and has been so under- 
stood, not only in the songs of poets — “The fields did 


LAUGHTER OF PLEASURE 


9 


laugh, the flowers did freshly spring” — but also in the 
rituals of religion. For it is only in our own too Chris- 
tian times that laughter was banished out of the 
church, and tears alone established as an appropriate 
approach to the deity. At the sacrificial altar, during 
the Roman festival of the Lupercalia, two young men 
would be touched with a bloody knife, and when the 
blood had been wiped from their foreheads with a 
handful of wool dipped in milk, the ritual required that 
they should laugh. It was a symbol of their deliver- 
ance into life, like that of Isaak under the knife of 
Abraham. And we are told that the name Isaak it- 
self in its origin means “he who laughs.” For thus 
in all primitive and naive religions, which are not so 
tinctured as ours is with death and negation, and 
whose believers actually believe in the reality of their 
deities, laughter has played its part. Not only have 
men laughed before God in thanksgiving for the bless- 
ing of life, but the gods themselves — the eight hundred 
myriads of gods — in whom life is immortal, have 
laughed immortally together. 

For these reasons it seems strange that tears and 
moanings and the piteous short wrinkles of grief in the 
forehead should be accepted by philosophers as justi- 
fied through their expressive value, while laughter, as 
though it were some kind of slip or misdemeanor on 
the part of nature, should always have to be explained 
away. I will not try to explain laughter away, but 
assuming it to be one of the most necessary gifts we 
have, and wholly to be taken for granted even if there 


10 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


were no funny thing in the world, I will explain why 
it was carried beyond its original domain, and employed 
in the appreciation of humor and jokes. 


CHAPTER II 

LAUGHTER OF PLAYFUL PAIN 

The condition in which joyful laughter most con- 
tinually occurs is that of play. And this is because 
the satisfactions enjoyed in play are strong and fre- 
quent, without being passionate enough to produce a 
more specific expression. Play is an attitude in which 
we exercise our instincts and experience our emotions 
superficially, as though tasting or smelling of them, but 
not drinking them down. We arrive at the point of 
satisfaction sooner and with less organic disturbance. 
We do not have to hack and slay an enemy in order 
to appease our fighting thirst; we are contented to 
win on points. We do not have to produce and cher- 
ish the flesh of a baby; we satisfy our parental instinct 
upon a puppy or a bundle of rags. And so it is with 
all our instincts — we fight, we hunt, we conduct court- 
ships, we construct houses and cities, acquire property, 
incur dangers, we lord it over our fellows, we demean 
ourselves before them, all in a miniature or mimic 
way, and yet with a pleasure that is altogether real. 
It is as though nature, realizing how strenuous and 
difficult a thing it is to live, had provided for us this 
faery-shadow life, in which we might prepare and exer- 
cise ourselves without suffering too much or perishing 
in strong passion, for the more genuine achievement of 

11 


12 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


satisfactions — and in which again we might refresh and 
restore ourselves, when the strain of achievement is 
great, and genuine satisfactions are too long withheld. 
Play is the school of nature, and also it is her device 
of recreation. And we can easily believe that with- 
out such a device she could never have created any- 
thing so complex, agile, intelligent, and resolute as 
some of the animals are, which play much and have a 
long period of youth. 

Philosophers have been accustomed to define play 
as any activity that is undertaken for the pleasure in- 
volved in it, and not for the sake of an end to be 
achieved. And we do, of course, naturally call such 
deliberate pursuits of pleasure in action playful. But, 
although it is natural to call them playful, it is not good 
science to define play as consisting of this pursuit. 
For play in its elementary form is not deliberate but 
instinctive. It is not a conscious undertaking but a 
spontaneous attitude. It is not distinguished by the 
idea of getting pleasure, but by the fact that pleasure 
is so easily got. When we put our hand between the 
teeth of a young puppy of the fighting breed in a rough 
mimic of battle, we do not rely upon his understand- 
ing that the object of the engagement is amusement 
and not bloodshed; we rely upon his instincts. We 
know that he will perceive and adopt the play-attitude 
without previous instruction, and with hardly the 
possibility of error. He can play at fighting just as 
early and just as mysteriously well as he can fight. 
He does not have to keep up any mental reservation, or 


LAUGHTER OF PLAYFUL PAIN 


13 


have it explained to him that it is “all in fun,” that we 
are “only fooling.” It is not an idea, but a fact, that 
he is fooling; and he can be relied upon never to sink 
his teeth home, for the reason that in that state of 
fact he gets a full satisfaction without it. In our own 
mature and intellectual life a conscious purpose seizes 
and develops this hereditary gift, a serious thought de- 
vises games and sports and dances to increase the 
harvest of its pleasure. But at the root and centre of 
the whole perennial circus of our fun, there remains 
the same fact — the same definite condition of the in- 
stincts. And however it may be ultimately explained, 
this condition is characterized by the accessibility and 
predominance of pleasure, rather than by the pursuit 
of it. 

We do not know much in a scientific way about 
pleasure and displeasure, or what it is within us that 
makes us satisfied or unsatisfied. But we know at 
least that a deep and general activity of our instincts 
entails them both. The instinct of fear and that 
called “disgust” seem to be painful in their very be- 
ginning, and all the instincts hurt us when they are 
aroused and then baffled so that we feel the lack of 
their fulfilment. For this reason the predominance 
of pleasure in their playful exercise is more remark- 
able, and implies a more complex adjustment of our 
organs, than we who are so accustomed to the fact 
have ever thought. For if real and solid satisfaction 
comes in the play-attitude from mimic or superficial 
achievement, we should expect dissatisfaction to be 


14 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


real and solid whenever this slight achievement fails. 
If we shout so joyfully in play’s victories why should we 
not sob desperately in its pains ? It seems to me just 
here that nature, in her necessity to make us happy 
when we play — by what interior means we can hardly 
guess — has triumphed over the very terms of life. 
For she has ordained it in the inmost structure of our 
minds that playful failures have a peculiar interest for 
us, and playful dreadfulness instead of hurting makes 
us laugh. Indeed it is the first sure sign of play in 
babies when they giggle instead of looking troubled 
at our gargoyle faces, and when they find amusement 
in our snatching away a thing they have reached out 
to grasp. That feeling of amusement is a new, unique 
one, and that giggle is a different act from the smile of 
gratification which greets a friendly look. It is an 
act of welcoming a playful shock or disappointment — 
an act for which our nervous systems are arranged 
at birth as perfectly, and with as specific an accompani- 
ment of interest and emotion, as they are arranged to 
greet with anger and pugnacious effort a more serious 
blockage of our wills. It is an instinct. And this 
instinct is the germ and simple rudiment of what we 
call the sense of humor. 

We can make credible to our minds the develop- 
ment of such an instinct, if we consider what a delicate 
balance is kept up in many circumstances between 
pleasure and pain. Even when we are seriously 
shocked and horrified, a spasm of mad laughter 
not infrequently occurs; and in great moments of 


LAUGHTER OF PLAYFUL PAIN 


15 


delight, on the other hand, and often at the very 
tip-top of laughter, we fall to weeping. It is almost 
a custom for one or two to dissolve in tears around 
the Christmas-tree and on birthdays; and the sobs 
of happy love and of sudden rescue, the strong 
weeping at the prodigal’s return, are among the most 
natural manifestations of healthy human nature. In 
unhealthy states the interchange of these expressions 
is even more pronounced. A chronic habit of violent 
laughing at sad news has been observed; and the acute 
confusion of hot tears with hilarious laughter is almost 
the commonest form of hysteric seizure. In young 
children such confusions are not called hysterical, but 
are assumed to be normal to the undeveloped. They 
make it evident that in our fine mechanism of nerves 
some rather slight interior accident can divert a po- 
tential state of feeling from one of these channels of 
act and reality into the other. And although the 
ability to sob and thus droop down with joy, could 
hardly have been cherished as an advantage in the 
development of our species, we need not be surprised 
if the opposite accident — the ability to smile and even 
outrageously to laugh when we are shocked or disap- 
pointed — has been crystallized and, for the purposes of 
play at least, made fast in our endowment as a mode 
of regular response. 

The most crude and elementary form of play, the 
only one which has a physiological basis of its own, is 
tickling. And since much of the laughter that occurs 
in tickling is accompanied with a humorous emotion. 


16 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


we must look to this game for the authentic and first 
picture of what humor is. It appears that our skin 
has an exaggerated sensitivity at certain points which 
in real battle it is of vital importance that we should 
defend. We dread to be touched at these points, 
and impetuously protect ourselves against the playful 
assaults of a companion. We thus learn and exercise 
the art of self-defense. But although we have so vio- 
lent an impulse to protect these points from contact, 
we are not violently aggrieved when they are touched, 
but on the contrary we are uproariously amused. We 
find this thing which we had fought off with horror to 
be not horrible at all but comic. And for that reason, 
although we continue to fight it off, we still continue 
to invite it. We experience thus a confused sense of 
pain combined with pleasure, or at least the dread of 
pain with humorous delight, which since the day of 
Plato the psychologists have vainly taxed their science 
to explain. 

Whether the pleasure is on the surface and the 
pain, as Plato seemed to think it, “underneath,” or 
whether the sensation is painful and the pleasure lies 
in some conceptual or perceptive contribution of the 
brain, or whether there are two kinds of sensation 
deserving each a long new serious Greek name, as a 
modern scientist proposes, the question never has 
been put to rest. Only that something which is or 
ought to be painful, is also or sometimes manages to 
be pleasant, they are all agreed. And we can, by 
means of the concept of a humorous instinct, give at 


LAUGHTER OF PLAYFUL PAIN 


17 


least a simple and not illogical description of the point 
of their agreement. 

Tickling is unpleasant when we “take it seriously.” 
And for that reason to some sober adults it is always 
unpleasant, and even merry children cannot enjoy 
tickling or respond with laughter unless they are dis- 
tinctly in a mood of play. For that reason also, even 
where the skin is sensitive enough, we cannot very 
well enjoy tickling ourselves. We cannot regard our 
own attacks as playful. And they are not playful — 
for the essence of this fighting game, if not perhaps in 
some degree the essence of all play, is social. But 
when we are attacked by a playmate, toward whom 
we are “ in fun,” we find at just those points where we 
should experience a disagreeable sensation if we were 
serious, the experience of a peculiar and pleasant emo- 
tion. It is a true description of this fact to say that 
those otherwise unpleasant contacts, and those other- 
wise intolerable dismays and disappointments, awaken 
through our central nervous systems in the state of 
play, an instinctive laughter whose interior feeling we 
enjoy. And it is an explanation at least of the bio- 
logical development of such laughter, to say that with- 
out it this most useful form of play could never have 
acquired its peculiar character — the character of mor- 
tal combat without suffering. 

In common English speech we recognize this critical 
position of the humorous instinct in the mind’s me- 
chanics, for we are agreed now upon the word funny as 
a generic name for all the situations which arouse it. 


18 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


And funny stands in a mid-position between play and 
perplexity. It appears that some northern cousin of 
the Gaelic word for pleasure, fonn, was so full of pure 
and fair delight that in the seventeenth century it was 
simply ravished and carried away home by these lit- 
erary English — who have always been word-robbers of 
the most delicate and voluptuous taste — and there it 
absorbed into its meaning, as fun, all that there is of 
affirmative enjoyment in the mood of play. But this 
enjoyment is so evidently related by proximity and 
dependence to a sense of humor, that wdthin another 
century the word funny was found to be a name for 
the situations in which that instinct is appealed to. 
And these situations, again, are so clearly of a baffling 
or a lightly troubling nature, that this same word 
funny is now in another century employed to describe 
things in sober life that perplex us, and give pause, not 
too distressing, to our serious wills. 

The development of language has thus been wiser in 
our time than any philosopher. But once long ago 
the great unharnessed eye of Rabelais perceived and 
named this same connection of qualities. It was in 
his celebration of Pantagruelism, “wdiich you know,” 
he said, “is a certain jollity of mind, pickled in the 
scorn of fortune.” That was a description of humor 
in its first as well as its last essence. And Rabelais 
is the sovereign of the world’s humor, exactly because 
all his jests and vagaries are conceived, born, and bred 
to flourish in their native home and atmosphere, the 
attitude of play. With that gigantic mental and 


LAUGHTER OF PLAYFUL PAIN 19 


poetic equipment which we attribute besides only to 
Plato and Shakespeare, this genius of exuberance sim- 
ply romped and gambolled all over the universe. It 
is well that he should speak the last word here. 


CHAPTER III 
ELEMENTARY HUMOR 

Play, then, is a preliminary or divertive surface- 
life in which success is fun, but failure funny. And 
it is natural enough, and will seem entirely proper to 
those who have ever tasted the dregs of hard work and 
deep passion, that we revert to this elysian condition 
very frequently in the midst of our serious lives. There 
may be a tincture of it in the most solemn efforts. 

The happy are they 
Whose work is play. 

And it seems certain that in any just and genially 
composed society a good many people will be able to 
be happy a good deal of the time, and there W'ill be at 
least a hearty effort toward the propagation of those 
“ jolly fools of ease and leisure,” who, like Rabelais 
himself, could be happy all the time if they did not 
have to settle the account. 

Even in our own fallen state of moral bondage and 
pecuniary anxiety there is a development of the nega- 
tive or defensive side of playful happiness, the sense 
of humor, which alters the entire color of our lives. 
It goes with us into the most severe and head-weary- 


ELEMENTARY HUMOR 


21 


ing and humdrum pursuits, protecting us with its 
shield of fine amusement against what would otherwise 
be a continual series of trivial but irritating stings of 
disappointment. It enables us to be experimental and 
persistent in our efforts and perceptions. It makes 
our impulses elastic. It is a very inward indispensable 
little shock-absorber — an instinct, as we might call it, 
for making the best of a bad thing. 

For in every case in which a man laughs humor- 
ously there is an element which, if his sensitivity were 
sufficiently exaggerated, would contain the possibility 
of tears. He is a man who has suffered or failed of 
something. And although in the humor of art he 
usually arrives at something else, and that often better 
than he had expected, in the humor of every-day life 
he frequently arrives nowhere at all. And the true 
agility of his comic sense is proven, not in the clever- 
ness with which he detects the point of pleasure in a 
jocular confection, but in the alert twinkle of welcome 
with which he greets any genuine and definite void 
appearing where a pleasure was expected. When a 
man intends to drive a tack into the carpet, and drives 
his thumb in instead, he may be said to have failed 
of a pleasure, and if he is not too remote from the 
mood of play, and did not intend to drive the tack in 
too far, it should be possible for him to smile. It was 
upon such occasions at least that nature intended him 
to smile. For her purpose in making humor accessible 
to him in sober life was to preserve his digestion, and 
defend the ears and lives of his immediate family, no 


22 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


matter into what extremities of small pest and disaster 
her restlessness might drive him. 

Humor is thus the most philosophic of all the emo- 
tions. It is a recognition in our instinctive nature of 
what our minds in their purest contemplation can in- 
form us, that pleasure and pain are, except for the in- 
cidental purpose of preserving us, indifferent — that 
failure is just as interesting as success. Good and bad 
are but colored lights rayed out upon the things around 
us by our will to live, and since life contains both good 
and bad forever, that very will that discriminates them 
practically, gives a deeper poetic indorsement to them 
both. Let us not take the discrimination, then, too 
seriously. So speaks the sense of humor with a gay 
wisdom among our emotions. 

x^nd when gaiety fails, and those in whose tempera- 
ment this sense predominates give their serious esti- 
mate of the values they have played wdth, it is apt to 
be the same. Their estimate is sceptical. There is 
a sorrow in the seriousness of humorous people. They 
do not easily find among ideals or purposes a place of 
rest. The courage in their eyes is wistful. They are 
superior to this world, not as the saint who fastens 
upon some more-than-earnest faith to raise him out 
of it, but as a child is superior to his toys. He looks 
about upon them for a moment, knowing them for 
what they are. He is not disillusioned; he is simply 
aware of the fact that all their values derive from his 
own w r hims. 

There was indeed a note of disillusion in those sad 


ELEMENTARY HUMOR 


23 


documents that Mark Twain left after him. His 
sublime and yet rather feebly philosophic declaration 
of the worthlessness of all the myriads of human lives 
— “a mistake, a failure, and a foolishness,” as he called 
them — was a too negative reaction against the ethico- 
deific atmosphere of puritan and presbyterian America. 

“Another myriad takes their place,” he says, “and 
copies all they did, and goes along the same profitless 
road, and vanishes as they vanished — to make room 
for another, and another, and a million other myriads, 
to follow the same arid path through the same desert, 
and to accomplish what the first myriad and all the 
myriads that came after it accomplished — nothing!” 

The great child was sick of the mythical pretenses 
of his elders; but it was only from the standpoint of 
those pretenses that his own perceptions could acquire 
so purple and pessimistic an eloquence. Stated affirma- 
tively the clear-eyed sceptic’s view of human life — 
life’s transitory arrogant self-constitution of the ends 
for which it shall be lived — however sadly it may an- 
swer some pale longings of the heart, is not so loftily 
disheartening. It is heroic rather than sublime. 
Montaigne is the humorist’s philosopher. His brave, 
cool, undeluded assumption that life is no more than 
what it is or makes itself in any instance, and that 
the values we impute to things have no external or 
transcendent sanction, is but a development of the 
natural implications of the humorous sense. I do not 
see how any one habitually in the play-attitude, and 
whose very genius lies in the subjective transmutation 


24 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


of these values, could well hold to an opposite opinion. 
And I doubt if the world ever saw a great inevitable 
humorist who had not, in his inmost metaphysics, 
something of this same noble and intrepid sceptic. 

Humor is of all things most unlike religion. It fills 
a similar function in our moral economy, relieving us 
of the intolerable poignancy of our individual wills. 
But it does this by a simple emotional mitigation, 
whereas religion seems to require a great and heavy 
process in the heart. Religion magnifies the serious- 
ness of our passions, but finds an object which is im- 
personal, or merely ideal, or in some other way su- 
perior to the vicissitudes of fortune, to which it may 
attach them — binding them all, or many of them, to- 
gether into one fixed habit of indefeasible satisfaction. 
From this great habit the mystic derives his fortitude. 
He declares that all the failures and imperfections in 
the bitter current of time’s reality are a part of God’s 
eternal perfection, and so he makes himself happy to 
suffer them. The humorist declares that they are 
funny, and he accomplishes the same thing. They 
both depart in some sense from the poet’s pure experi- 
ence of life, but they depart in contrary directions. 
And so it is not surprising that the mystics should seem 
wanting in the sacred gift of humor, and that humor- 
ists should be not often of a prayerful turn. 

A prayer is indeed the intense opposite of a comic 
laugh, and the assertion of Lamennais, of Johann 
Erdmann, and other pious philosophers, that they 
could not imagine the Christ laughing, is a true index 


ELEMENTARY HUMOR 


25 


of the condition toward Him of their own nerves. 
Humor is not, as they thought, necessarily malign or ir- 
reverent, but it is of a quality incompatible with that 
fixed concentration of serious feelings which we call 
devout. Its essence is flexibility instead of fixation. 
Its food is not unity, but variety. It is superior to 
religion in its hospitality toward the continual arrivals 
of truth. It is a more congenial companion of science. 
Not only is humor independent of any particular be- 
lief or intellectual commitment, and so not hostile to 
the mood of inquiry, but in softening the rigor of the 
passions it removes the chief obstacle to the process 
of verification. Is not pure science in fact a kind of 
arduous play among the meanings that have been de- 
vised by the applied sciences for the purposes of work ? 
I remember that Isaac Newton described his discov- 
eries as those of a child at play among ideas. And at 
any rate it is the continual effort of pure science to 
get rid of human valuations where it can. Humor is 
the very act of taking those valuations lightly. It is 
an act of aggressive resignation. 

Mahomet boasted that with faith and prayer he 
could make a mountain get up and come to him. And 
when a great crowd of his followers had assembled, 
and all his incantations failed, he said: “Well, if the 
mountain will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet will 
go to the mountain.” And so we strive with all our 
energy and ingenuity to make the course of things do 
us pleasure, and as the course of things continually 
disappoints us, we say: “Very well — I will find a special 


26 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


pleasure in the disappointment!” That is our sense 
of humor. Humor is Mahomet going to the moun- 
tain. Its very existence is a kind of joke at the ex- 
pense of destiny. 


CHAPTER IV 
JOKES WITH A POINT 

This little interior line of self-defense may seem a 
slender ground upon which to explain all the aggres- 
sive revels of wit and humorous fancy among the joys 
of existence. It seems both too negative and too sim- 
ple a thing. But we must remember that in every 
prolonged laughing tale or entertainment there are 
many objects of delight as well as of humor. In the 
comic theatres our merry laughter is often pure of 
any admixture from this instinct. And the word 
comedy itself, although so closely related to the word 
comic, does not mean a humorous drama. It means, 
if I may add one more opinion to this ancient subject 
of dispute, a drama in which the play-attitude prevails 
— a “play,” in short, as properly so called, and so dis- 
tinguished from that intenser drama in which although 
we know it is illusive our passions are seriously en- 
gaged. And in these “plays,” even when they are 
very boisterous, and make us laugh in chorus like a 
flock of hungry geese, it is pleasure half the time, ex- 
cited pleasure and not humor, that we feed upon. 

There is a further reason, too, why this defensive 
instinct seems too simple to explain the forms of 
humor. And that is that in our adult and calculating 
years the things that we call humorous are not often 

27 


28 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


purely so. We do not laugh loudly, except at times 
of rare hilarity, at the mere negation of our own ten- 
dencies. We are not playful enough for that. We 
think it is a little “ foolish 5 ' to take so much pleasure 
as children do in all kinds of jerks, pranks, monkey- 
faces, and absurd nonsense. Playing children enjoy so 
indiscriminately every kind of shock or balk or failure 
of anything to be quite what it should, that we with 
our egregious wisdom have almost decided that they 
lack the sense of humor altogether. Their sense of 
humor is more primed and violent than ours, more 
close to its true purpose; and that is why they laugh 
so lavishly, and without the slight restraint which 
might intensify their inward feeling of the laughter. 
They laugh at anything that is really nothing; but 
we require a hint of the delivery of real values to warm 
up our interest in nothing, and make it seem intelli- 
gent to laugh. We laugh at jokes. And a joke is a 
little node, or gem-like moment in our experience, 
created by the exact coincidence of a playful shock or 
disappointment with a playful or a genuine satisfaction. 

Our brain is just balancing, as we might imagine, 
upon that fine edge between pain and pleasure at the 
failure of what it had momently desired, when there 
looms into the void some unexpected ripe apple of a 
thing desired more, or desired at least deeply and con- 
tinually, and with a hunger that can be relied on to 
be glad. And by this means that arbitrary trick of 
turning loss into gain, which was our humorous in- 
stinct, is actually warranted and borne out by the facts. 


JOKES WITH A POINT 


29 


The loss is gain; reality imitates our instinct; the laugh- 
ter of pleasure flows in to reinforce the laughter of play- 
ful pain, and we experience not only a humorous feel- 
ing, but a feeling of aptness that is not like anything 
else under the sun. We call this fine moment of co- 
identity the "point” of a joke. And it is by cherish- 
ing the quality of these points — perfecting the playful 
negations and sliding into the hearts of them all kinds, 
degrees, and shades, and tones of life’s real value, that 
the comic artist gets the whole world tinctured with a 
humorous emotion, and builds such varicolored struc- 
tures as he does. 

He tells us of a terrible fighting man of his neighbor- 
hood who has been offended by a gang of bums, and 
proposes to go over to their saloon and clean them 
out. 

"You come along,” he says to his friend, "and you 
can stand outside the door and count them as they 
come through.” 

The friend goes along — and our perennial anticipa- 
tion of a riot goes too. We take up our position in 
the entrance with his friend. There is a moment of 
silence, then a great bump through the door, and the 
voice of the terrible fighting man: "Stop counting — 
it’s me!” 

Without analyzing all the delights that we receive 
here in lieu of the grand scene of which we have been 
deprived, we can say that these delights are more ex- 
quisite, and, lusty as our taste is for massacres, just 
as satisfying to the prevailing appetites of our nature. 


30 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


We have lost a conquering hero, but gained the abase- 
ment of a braggart, and that is the way in which our 
grown-up wishes like to be fooled. 

Humor in its adult state is thus seen to be some- 
what like electricity, and to possess two currents — a 
negative and a positive. The negative current is a 
discommoding of some light or playful interest that 
has been specifically aroused, the positive a gratification 
of some interest which, if it has not been specifically 
aroused, may at least be assumed to have a general 
existence in the hearts of those w T ho are to laugh. And 
from this it appears how very precarious an explosive 
a joke is, and in how many different ways it can man- 
age to miss fire. For one may fail to arouse any in- 
terest in the first place, or he may arouse a too serious 
interest, in the matter which is to supply the negative 
current — or perhaps an interest badly proportioned to 
that which is to supply the positive current; and then 
he may have miscalculated on the positive side, and 
thought that his audience would like something to 
which they can hardly offer a moment’s attention or 
which they may heartily oppose, and so he will find 
he has given them only a double disappointment for 
their pains. 

A joke is not a thing to be mauled and tinkered and 
revamped and translated about like an old trunk, 
from one nation, race, tribe, family, generation, or 
language, into another. It is a chemical gem, a deli- 
cate and precarious contexture of non-affinitive quali- 
ties, likely to go off at the touch of a feather in appro- 


JOKES WITH A POINT 


31 


priate circumstances, or to lie flat and mute as a pan- 
cake if discomposed or mismanaged. There is no 
flower in nature more fragile of transport, more rooted 
in the specific. Every jest has its season; it flourishes 
and dies. Every man has some sly chuckle inside of 
his own teeth. Every two who live together in a 
house, if they live happily, train up some droll mum- 
meries mutual to them, but which would seem pretty 
foolish exposed to the public view. It was a unique 
genius that Charles Lamb had, to so domesticate his 
readers and win them to his whims, that these inside 
familiar fooleries of his became the property of the 
whole world. For humorists who are less gifted with 
a very possessing grace of spirit, it is necessary to play 
upon impulses that are common at least to a consider- 
able group, and can be relied upon to be in a state of 
appetite almost all the time. 


CHAPTER V 
HUMOR AND HOSTILITY 

One of the impulses most often relied upon to sup- 
ply the positive current in a humorous passage is the 
impulse to fight. It appears that men bring out of 
their animal past a disposition which, if left uninhibited 
by reflection or by standards of cultural propriety, 
would settle most disagreements with a trial by battle. 
When two roosters cross paths, in no matter how peace- 
ful a pursuit of summer grasshoppers, they automatic- 
ally bridle and “pick on” each other. They give a 
fair picture of healthy but unreflective life, and I sup- 
pose that if our bodies went along in a semiconscious 
state of business, they would behave in somewhat the 
same fashion. For whatever gentle thing our culture 
may make out of us, we are each born with the brain 
and nervous system of a timid yet belligerent savage, 
and we achieve that gentility not without the checking 
of many little continual impulses of wrath and retalia- 
tion. These may be imagined to become dammed up 
in the course of time, into a great reservoir of abstract 
hostility in the parts of our brain that are not con- 
scious, and this reservoir can be tapped at any mo- 
ment by any one who will offer us an opportunity to 
pick on a fellow savage with propriety and no danger. 
And humor, because it is upon its negative side play- 

32 


HUMOR AND HOSTILITY 


33 


ful, and upon its positive side concealed and secondary 
and not too straightly spoken, offers such an oppor- 
tunity in a most engaging form. It is a facile kind 
of humor, therefore, to arouse in us any light attitude 
of expectation, and then, in the very act of disappoint- 
ing that, give us the opportunity to take a good re- 
sounding crack at some poor fool. 

An individual toward whom we cherish the eternal 
hope of this opportunity is the professional optimist, 
the rotund charitable ready talker, who makes a fat 
living supporting wdth his breath the status quo . A 
joker will show us the round legs of this gentleman on 
tour down the middle of an East Side street crowded 
with hot rubbish and flies and animated children — 
“ What’s all this talk about the death-rate ?” he shouts. 
“ These kids are alive!” Is it not clear that while 
these words cheat us of the slight logical satisfaction 
they seemed to hold out, they offer in the same instant 
a more stimulating pleasure, that of scorning the fool 
who said them ? 

Thomas Hobbes was so much impressed by this joy 
of the hostile stroke, which he described with true 
barbaric appreciation as a feeling of “ sudden glory,” 
that he made it the basis of a general explanation of 
laughter. And long before Hobbes — indeed, ever 
since the birth of psychology — philosophers have been 
informing the world that the essence of humor is 
ridicule, that laughter is always at somebody, that 
jokes are always on somebody, that comic emotion is 
the same thing as scorn or the feeling of one’s own 


34 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


superiority. It is a mistake that arises naturally out 
of the frequent occurrence of this feeling among the 
positive values that enter into the creation of jokes. 
But a joke is not a single feeling; it is an emotional 
process. And the thing that makes a person whom we 
scorn comic, and not merely contemptible, is that our 
scorn enters into that process at a point where we 
ourselves have just been baffled and deprived of some 
other satisfaction. And usually it will have been our 
active sympathy with that very person which has been 
baffled. For we have a tendency to inward imitation 
so impetuous that, when nothing opposes it, we actu- 
ally accompany every one whom we see or imagine pur- 
suing or attempting anything. We look forward to 
his success, and when he is foiled, we also are foiled. 
But in the very discomfiture of our sympathy, itself 
humorous, we find a treat for our antipathy, which 
waits ready in the background, and so we are twice 
justified in laughing. It is the peculiar readiness of 
this antipathy, this repressed genius for hostile com- 
bat, combined with the inevitable coincidence of its 
most appropriate occasions with a funny disappoint- 
ment of our sympathy, that gives it so predominant a 
place in comedy and wit. Ridicule is not the original 
or characteristic kind of comedy or wit; it is merely the 
easiest kind to create. Its prevalence is not due to 
the nature of the comic, but to the nature of man. 

Aristophanes created a great deal of satiric laughter 
along the sides of the Acropolis at the expense of the 
poet Euripides, and we may recall one of his fine gibes 


HUMOR AND HOSTILITY 


35 


as a sufficiently classic example of this humor that 
laughs with the pale ghost of a sneer. The scene was 
laid in the next world, where a trial was in progress 
as to which of the two poets, iEschylus or Euripides, 
should sit by the throne of God as the Master of 
Tragedy. Euripides was found to have an extraor- 
dinary advantage in this trial because he had his 
tragedies right on hand, they all having died with him ! 

No audience, I am sure, could fail of a taste of 
sudden glory in this joke on Euripides. And yet both 
the suddenness and the glory might be there, if it 
were simply stated with sufficient force and gesture 
that the tragedies of Euripides are dead. To state 
that Euripides has an advantage, and when our appe- 
tite is just reaching out with his to grasp that advan- 
tage, suddenly to present in the very heart of it the 
most square and overwhelming disadvantage — that is 
a joke. That gives us the pleasure, not only of en- 
joying Euripides’s discomfiture, but of enjoying it with 
comic laughter and emotion. 

It is true — as Horace and Cicero and Moliere and 
George Meredith and Henri Bergson and many other 
thoughtful men have set forth — that this kind of laugh- 
ter plays a great part as a social corrective, and that 
derisive humor is a fine weapon. So much more sheer 
and startling a weapon it is than scorn, that I find it 
surprising any one should ever have been content to 
identify the two. We bring a certain instinctive 
neural mechanism into play when we scorn a person, 
and if that person succumbs a little and not too much. 


36 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


we derive a strong satisfaction from our success. The 
onlookers, if our scorn is magnetic and the occasion 
appropriate, may be led along with us to that satis- 
faction. But if, in addition to our scorn, we bring 
also another instinctive mechanism, the sense of humor, 
giving ourselves and them the opportunity to draw 
from a new source a far more agreeable and tonic satis- 
faction, it is plain that our ascendancy over the vic- 
tim is greatly enhanced. His state of debasement has 
now become the source of a dear and infectious pleasure 
to the whole company, who are at play, and he will 
have a hard time making them let go of it. Is not 
that an explanation that really explains the superior 
power of ridicule and satire over scorn? 

I suspect that the reason why so many philosophers 
have deemed all laughter to be of the derisive flavor 
is that they dreaded the prick of it. What we learn 
from their theories of “ sudden glory” and the “ feel- 
ing of superiority,” is that they hated to be laughed 
at. Hobbes hated to be laughed at, I am sure, and 
so did Plato, for he was always advising his friends 
that it is not philosophic to laugh very loud. And 
the reason why we hate to be laughed at, is that we 
experience a feeling of inferiority on such occasions, 
that is indeed logical and involved in the essence of 
the case. For no matter how truly the laughers may 
hasten to assure us that they are not hostile, but only 
happy — they feel no scorn but rather a delighted love 
of our natural blunder — still there remains the fact 
that we are inferior. We have supplied that stumbling 


HUMOR AND HOSTILITY 


37 


which alone could cause their humorous recoil, and 
we know it, and only a very active humorous instinct 
of our own can make us enjoy that in their presence 
which we might well have enjoyed if they were away. 
Men are not so extremely avid of sudden glory, but 
they have a sensitive distaste for the sudden descent 
from glory, and this modest trait has helped much to 
make Hobbes’s erroneous theory live after him. 

We are almost as timid as we are belligerent by 
hereditary nature. And although our timid impulses 
find freer vent in the conditions of modern life than 
our belligerent ones, still they too are repressed and 
dammed up by culture and opinion, and will seek a 
vent with relief if occasion offers. No doubt there 
are people wdio possess a more acute military fervor 
than I do, but when I first heard of that brave soldier 
who was always to be found where the bullets are thick- 
est — in the ammunition wagon — I can well remember 
how the fine march of heroic meaning and emotion was 
suddenly exploded, and there flowed in to fill up the 
vacuum another meaning and a feeling of most happy 
and concrete relief. It would be folly to tell me that I 
was scorning the soldier. I was with him in the am- 
munition wagon. And there are others, I venture to 
believe, who, no matter how heroically they may be- 
have in the circumstances where social opinion de- 
mands it, will gladly avail themselves of the little 
opportunity that a joke offers to crawl into a hole 
and behave naturally. 


CHAPTER VI 
HUMOR AND SEXUALITY 

It seems especially surprising that any one should 
have thought to identify humor with hostile and ego- 
istic emotion, when another passion of our nature 
stands at least equal to these in supplying the joy ends 
of the most popular jokes, and that is the passion of 
sex. Just as Hobbes long ago drew the attention of 
cultivated men to that fine heritage of the bloody and 
barbaric in their bosoms, Sigmund Freud now com- 
pels them to confess that their bodies are great surging 
tanks full of lust and suppressed carnal hungers, which 
they draw up into their minds and transform into this 
strong energy of interest that plays forth upon a 
variety of things, but never exhausts its source. We 
are always ready to be happy in a taste of those poign- 
ant parts of life that for life’s sake we conceal, and 
the swift sharp force with which these imprisoned 
hungers will seize upon any least gap or stumbling of 
speech or idea, to rush in and declare that they have 
been implied, is the one thing upon which every hu- 
morist in every company can rely. He can so fully 
and so fatuously rely upon it, that we shall have to 
retract here the statement that ridicule is the easiest 
kind of joke to create. The easiest kind of joke to 
create is one in which there is no crux or quality what- 

38 


HUMOR AND SEXUALITY 


39 


ever in the negation — no interesting playful recoil — 
but just a sniggering intimation that there might be, 
and that if there were, some sexual act or exhibition 
might come in to take the place of what had been in- 
tended. One need say nothing indeed, but merely 
dwell with a persistent eye, as Uncle Toby does in 
“ Tristram Shandy,” upon some feature of the chimney- 
piece, in order to get a witless laugh out of people who 
are all filled up with unsatisfied curiosity as to things 
of similar conformation. The Anglo-Saxons are more 
commonly in this condition, I think, than the southern 
races of Europe, and it is only among them and the 
Germans that the humor of the naughty kitten variety 
has enjoyed a very high popularity. The furtive 
smirk is absent from a Frenchman’s enjoyment of 
sex wit, and playful humor the more present. Rabe- 
lais swings open the doors and marches in like an 
orphan giant, where Sterne sits lurking at a peep- 
hole in fear of his parents. And people of Rabelaisian 
license, people who feel free at least to experience in 
reality the things that they desire to experience, are 
capable of a more fastidiously humorous taste, as well 
as a more playful pleasure in sexual jokes, than people 
who are too thirsty for implications. For them it 
remains to hold up some standard of the real art of 
humor even upon this topic, and not rush like a flock 
of spinster hens with indiscriminate cackling after the 
least flicker of a sexual sensation. 

There is no doubt that a great deal of our pleasure 
in the most casual humor is flavored with an emotion 


40 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


from the sphere of sex — our conscious attention being 
at play with the negative, while our unconscious takes 
its fill of a positive satisfaction we do not attend to. 
Persons of very maidenly mind will often laugh loudly 
at a break in meaning which without its sexual im- 
plication would hardly provoke a smile, and yet if 
that implication were consciously apprehended would 
make them blush and not laugh at all. Freud likes 
to tell us that all the really hilarious satisfactions in 
humor, even those of the sudden glory kind, can be 
induced by his science of psychoanalysis to come in 
and declare themselves fundamentally sexual. But 
this does not seem very generous toward the com- 
panionable variety of nature. Like the statement of 
Hobbes, instead of defining the general character of 
humor, it seems to define the sphere of his paramount 
interest in it. Freud has made himself a wise and 
wonderful scientist of sex, and has given a gift of illu- 
mination to the world not second to that which Hobbes 
gave, and so we can forgive him if he somewhat over- 
strains the generalization, and tends to carry us back 
to a contemplation of oneness almost as bad as that 
of the sickly mystics whom he knows how to cure. 
He has at least lifted a great incubus of shame from 
the shoulders of humanity, and given the boon of 
candor to a poor animal desperately endeavoring to 
become a man. 

A little girl who was just waking to the existence of 
a problem in these matters composed a love-story 
which proceeded somewhat as follows: “Once upon a 


HUMOR AND SEXUALITY 


41 


time there was a boy and girl who loved each other, 
and they wanted to get married, but they couldn’t 
afford it, so they decided to be good until he could 
earn some money. Well, on his way home, he found 
a purse containing a million dollars, and they got mar- 
ried, and the next day they had twins, which proves 
that virtue brings its own reward.” 

We share, of course, the conviction of this author 
that virtue brings its own reward — we have known at 
least that it gets none from any other source — and we 
feel the same wonderful law of necessity by which the 
hero and heroine of every tale that is told must be 
good. We are naturally somewhat taken aback, there- 
fore, to learn in the same words in which we are being 
told of the goodness of these two, that they were not 
good. It is a shock to our sensibilities, but then, 
after all, we are not sorry — we have been good our- 
selves, or tried to, and that is enough! And so our 
laughter is a little more joyful than seems appropriate 
to the author even in so extraordinary a triumph of 
what is right. It is a joy of released impulse from the 
unconscious, blowing up from that cavern to swell the 
sails of a laugh that is already on its way. That is 
the fact which Freud has so well compelled us to 
understand. 


CHAPTER VII 
HUMOR AND TRUTH 

Laughter has perhaps a more elementary — or at 
least a more strong and spasmodic — connection with 
states of triumphant lust and battle cruelty than with 
any other satisfactions except those of the social in- 
stinct itself. And hence that peculiar loon-like, hys- 
terical, crying giggle that comes out of some people 
whenever in joking either of these springs is touched. 
It is not humor, but glee, that makes them whoop so 
loud at cruel gibes and obscene quips and mimicries. 
And glee, while it may be a rank and ringing kind of 
pleasure, is of no more special pertinence to the art of 
joking than any other pleasure toward which we have 
a commonly unsatisfied hunger. So much indeed of 
what is real and strong and tasting of good earth in 
every direction is pressed down and out of our con- 
scious or conversational selves by various acquired 
tricks of virtue and decorum, that we may properly 
place Truth herself beside sex and sudden glory as a 
chief source of the joy motive in popular jokes. We 
are always hungry for the simple truth. 

Not only the proprieties of civilization but the more 
inward postulates of self-consciousness — consistency 
and good faith and loyalty and emotional stability 

42 


HUMOR AND TRUTH 


43 


and resolute adherence — all these excellent presump- 
tions insulate us from the flux of reality even through 
the portals of our own hearts. We are not free to 
experience the world’s being, or even our own beings 
within it. We are prisoners in a mist of pretense. 
And to shock us with the playful precipitation of that 
mist, and yet in the very shock to warm us with a 
clear serious glimpse of the naked movement of life, 
is a universal and joyful way of joking. We can all 
be honest playfully and for half a second. And to 
be honest without fear is an experience that may 
fitly be placed in comparison with the ecstasies of the 
saints. It is a most wholesome way to be redeemed 
— to be purged, in these forever-recurring quick flashes, 
from the original sin of self-consciousness. I can say, 
for instance, that if there is one thing I cannot endure 
about the learned, it is the information they possess. 
And I offer you there a little absurdity conjoined with 
the glimpse of a considerable interior truth. But to 
set down in serious and cold visibility the substance 
of that truth — which is certainly of the color neither 
of sex nor sudden glory — would exceed the strength of 
my candor. 

Aristophanes, the slap-stick comedian of the Acrop- 
olis, boasted that he was after all “the best of poets, 
the one who was reckless enough to speak truth among 
the Athenians.” He spoke truth among the Athe- 
nians to such point of uproar that he was arrested 
during the Peloponnesian War and tried for sedition. 
We do not know what the charge was in that early 


44 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


misadventure, but we have the copy of a later play in 
which his comic hero negotiated for himself and family 
a “ separate peace ” with Sparta, his reason being that 
he was not interested in international politics, and 
wanted to go home. That was an absurd performance, 
to be sure, a shattering of all the tragic prepossessions 
of the hour — but was not half the value of that ab- 
surdity its truth to what lay covered up through all 
those dark days in the hearts of the Athenian people ? 
One of our own comedists, Art Young, was arrested 
and tried for the same crime as Aristophanes during 
our own war of the worlds. And when he was put 
upon the witness-stand and asked in a terrible voice 
of accusation, “What did you mean, Mr. Young, by 
those pictures?” he who had so long delighted us 
with the originality of his humor, could only look 
down with a kind of bewildered belligerence in his 
good gray eyes and answer: “I meant nothing but 
what everybody knows!” 

It is not usually, indeed, a new truth, or truth as 
the result of any high intellectual analysis, whose force 
the humorist calls in to help us enjoy a playful shock. 
It is just the simple reality of feeling or sagacity of 
judgment that was already lurking in us. He may have 
no motive to instruct us, or improve our morals, or 
try to mix honesty with politics. His motive may be 
only to make good, strong, enduring, universal jokes. 
But the opportunity afforded by this contrast between 
the simple and eternal things in our hearts, and the 
grand procession of hysterical and temporary banner 


HUMOR AND TRUTH 


45 


and flapdoodle parading through our minds as thoughts, 
he cannot possibly resist. As an artist he is compelled 
to drop bombs of honesty in that procession. 

It is not a correct statement, however, of the rela- 
tion between these two things to say that “humor is 
truth.” Humor is often the last weapon in the hands 
of those who are menaced by a truth. Lacking the 
force or shamelessness to stand off truth’s champions 
in sober combat, these skulking jokers — among whom 
I am afraid we often find the celebrated Doctor John- 
son — have the trick of getting behind a joke and disap- 
pearing. What they do is to meet a serious thrust 
with a flatly frivolous and irrelevant rebuff, which 
would not be tolerated at all if it did not conceal also 
the serious satisfaction of some other interest than the 
one involved — perhaps an interest in some other 
truth — and thus permit the listener’s attention to slide 
off in a new direction and find rest. That is what Cic- 
ero meant when he advised his pupils in oratory that 
joking “very often disposes of extremely ugly matters 
that will not bear to be cleared up by proofs.” And 
for those orators who may find themselves on the side 
of the proofs, I offer this corresponding advice : Do not 
try to match wits with a Ciceronian joker, for you are 
retained and he is free; enjoy his joke as a perfectly 
frivolous pleasure, and then return with a reluctant 
force to serious speech, reserving your own wit until 
you are again in command. You will thus rob him of 
the appearance of having parried and thrust, when all 
he did was to jump out of the way of a wound. 


46 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


Humor is not truth — but truth, under the terms of 
this elaborate process we call civilized life, is humor- 
ous. And those who are not satisfied with the classi- 
cal authority upon this point will be interested to 
know that Charlie Chaplin has the same thing to say 
of his art as Aristophanes. 

"It is telling them the plain truth of things,” he 
replied instantly, when I asked him what it is that he 
does to people when he makes them laugh. "It is 
bringing home to them by means of a shock the sanity 
of a situation which they think is insane. When I 
walk up and slap a fine lady, for instance, because she 
gave me a contemptuous look, it is really right ! r iney 
won’t admit it, but it’s right, and that is why they 
laugh. 

"I make them conscious of life. ‘You think this is 
it, don’t you?’ I say, ‘well, it isn’t, but this is, see?’ 
And then they laugh.” 

I doubt if any joker ever gave a more penetrating 
analysis of his art. Its lovers will agree — and the 
lovers of every deeply moving art of humor — that it 
is full of the sudden uncoverings of a simple, original, 
and more purely burning element of reality, from which 
we have all somehow got intricately lost, and from 
which we still hold ourselves aloof, so that when his 
relentlessly playful hand uncovers it, our very gesture 
of the moment has been baffled, and yet our deepest 
wish drinks deep. 

There are people, of course, who lack altogether 
these deeper wishes, or have them so well stifled that 


HUMOR AND TRUTH 


47 


they seem really satisfied to dwell forever in the false 
fronts of decorum. I suppose they cannot come down 
to the face of reality even alone in the bathtub. And 
these people are resentful of the humor that reveals, 
because it shakes their confidence and frightens them. 
They call it “levity,” and wish to have it segregated 
and rendered irrelevant, confined to the “ funny page,” 
or the “comic paper,” included in parentheses, or at 
least stigmatized with an exclamation-point, or a 
pointed voice, or something else to indicate that it is 
not to be taken seriously or allowed to spread. Stanton 
called it “levity” when Abraham Lincoln endeavored 
to bring a little of the light of sagacious laughter 
into those stern meetings of the war cabinet. 

People who manifest this asperity or uncouth stupor 
at the play of humor through the serious enterprises 
of life must be either heavy of interest, so that they 
cannot shift within the time required from some end 
they were bent upon, to the new and perhaps greater 
one, or else they are shallow and timorous and unac- 
customed to dwell with these greater ends — the pas- 
sions and realities — even in their own hearts. A 
man whose interest is agile, and whose converse with 
life and death is mature, does not have to have a bell 
rung and a flag put up every time anything is to be 
taken humorously. He does not regard humor as an 
interlude. He is continually in hope that a bit of 
the framework will break back and something real 
look through the stucco front of our culture, and when 
not hoping that it will, he is contriving that it shall. 


48 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


For although he may be too fond of his own comfort 
to attack the sham and superficialities of man with 
anger and riot, he could not quite endure them if they 
were not continually shot through with humorous 
acknowledgments to the source and reality of life. 
To him seriousness in these weak exploits and waterish 
matters of conversation and business is the interlude, 
and humor the real engagement. A true joke is a 
reverence that we do to nature, an expiation for having 
so denied and betrayed her in our lives. It is at once 
a glad acceptance of failure in the puny enterprise upon 
which our mind is bent and a grateful acknowledg- 
ment of some greater good that she was holding out 
in her hands. 


CHAPTER VIII 
THE HUMOR OF QUANTITY 

Science is never so proudly happy as when it has 
got rid of qualities, and reduced all the enjoyable 
glories of this world to mere quantity and number. 
And we need not be surprised if our own hypothesis 
takes on a persuasive simplicity when we apply it to 
the humor that arises, and the pointed jokes that are 
created, by a manipulation of the mere quantity or 
degree of things. One need but magnify a subject 
plausibly enough to carry along the attention, and yet 
extremely enough to make belief or imagination im- 
possible, and no matter what he is talking about — it 
need not be a fish that he has caught — if his hearers 
are in a state of playful rapport with him, their disap- 
pointment will be humorous. And one need but speak 
with a winning and believable manner words which 
are so slight and inadequate to the facts as to be of no 
sense or credibility whatever, and the same result will 
follow. We call the latter process, the humor of un- 
derstatement, irony ; and the humor of overstatement 
we call exaggeration . They are forms of humor which 
require no very brainy ingenuity, but only a certain 
agility of imagination, in their creators; and they are 
forms which reveal more simply than any others the 
perfect essence of what humor is. 

49 


50 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


It is not mere magnitude or braggadocio at which 
we laugh, nor is it minuteness or mere modesty of 
speech. Neither of these things begets humorous 
laughter until it goes to the point of impracticability. 
We laugh not at the much, but the too much, and not 
at the little, but the too little. We laugh, that is, in 
the course of a simple quantitative variation that is 
playful, exactly at the point where we should, if we 
did not laugh, experience a real balk or bewilderment 
of mind. 

Imagine a person who has no sense of humor — and 
has not yet learned to relax and let pass when he sees 
others laughing — confronted with one of Rabelais’s 
accounts of a drinking-bout or a light meal of victuals. 
Imagine him attending to Mark Twain’s story of a 
night’s effort to find his way back to bed in the dark. 
He will meet nothing witty here, nothing ingenious, sly, 
double-turned, paradoxical, or even unusual. Every 
inch of that night’s journey he could duplicate out of 
his own personal recollection. And yet those inches 
are so wantonly multiplied, and their possibilities 
swelled out and extended, that by the time he reaches 
the conclusion — “I glanced furtively at my pedometer 
and found I had made 47 miles, but I did not care, 
for I had come out for a pedestrian tour anyway” — 
what can he do, this person who is without benefit of 
humor, but cry out in a kind of weak prayerful pro- 
fanity: “O Lord, this is too much !” In these cries of 
the unprotected is revealed the exact nature of the 
thing they lack. 


THE HUMOR OF QUANTITY 


51 


Mark Twain would have been at home among the 
Gargantuans. He and Rabelais both took an almost 
pathological delight in mere quantity and dimension. 
And yet we can find no more childlike example of 
the humor of understatement than that chapter 
of the “Pantagruellian Prognostications” beginning: 
“This year the stone-blind shall see but very little; 
the deaf shall hear but scurvily; the dumb shall not 
speak very plain; the rich shall be in somewhat a 
better case than the poor. . . And there is hardly 
a more celebrated ironic joke in history than Mark 
Twain’s message from London at the time when he was 
reported dead in the New York newspapers — “The re- 
ports of my death are grossly exaggerated.” The rea- 
son why those eight words became immortal, is that in 
the first place they are so natural and familiar in their 
general form as to tempt our confidence, and yet in the 
second place they are so related to the particular situa- 
tion as to be concisely and absolutely inadequate, and 
yet again in the third place they are made adequate — 
their humor acquires a point — through the fact that 
Mark Twain must have been alive to utter them. So 
much is contained in so brief an experience. But the 
humorous heart of that experience was his saying too 
little plausibly — a thing at which w T e laughed for the 
same essential reason that we so often laugh at his 
plausible sayings of too much. Pointed and raised to 
a high point of distinction, it is the same kind of humor 
as that of the cheery passer who remarks that “It 
looks like rain” when the clouds have burst and the 


52 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


town is standing in four feet of water. It is the kind of 
humor that Albert Einstein indulges in when he pref- 
aces a volume on “The Special and General Theory of 
Relativity ” with the hope that “This book may bring 
some one a few happy hours of suggestive thought !” 
The meaning is no doubt felicitous in direction, but it 
falls short in the amount. 

It is proper to apply the name of irony , in the first 
place, to the elementary humor of understatement, 
not only because of its peculiar flavor, but because in 
its origin that is what the word implied. In Aristotle’s 
ethics we find the two nouns, 6 aXa^cov and o ecpcov 
set off against each other as opposites — the one mean- 
ing a man who “talks big,” the other a dissembler, 
or one who avows less than he intends. And it was 
the application of this latter term to the peculiar 
humor of Socrates that gave popularity to that word 
irony , which has kept up all through the ages so deli- 
cate a balance between humor and the simple truth. 
Socrates would come up to some complacent citizen 
on the streets of Athens and ask him if he knew a 
certain thing. And when the citizen replied, “ Of 
course,” Socrates would say: “I just wanted to ask 
you, because I myself don’t know anything, and I 
wondered if it w r ould be possible for you to enlighten 
me a little.” From such a beginning would ensue a 
conversation in which the ignorant folly of the citizen 
and the adroit profundity of his questioner became 
equally apparent. 

Thus by a playful “saying little” Socrates was able 


THE HUMOR OF QUANTITY 


53 


seriously to mean much. His irony was pointed. 
And the point of it was almost always this identity 
that he would succeed in creating between his own 
delusive modesty and the real humiliation of his 
opponent. And so it was natural that the word irony, 
from meaning understatement, came to acquire a 
flavor of mild and gentle-minded scorn — gentle, be- 
cause in Socrates’s thoughts there lurked always the 
serious opinion that if he did know more than others, 
it was but the knowledge of his own ignorance. In- 
deed it is the peculiar charm of his irony that it never 
completely confesses itself to be a joke. We are never 
quite sure whether Socrates is humorously understat- 
ing himself, or whether he is simply the first and only 
man in creation who ever stated himself with enough 
hesitation to be accurate. The ironies of his successors 
usually reveal by some sheer impossibility in their 
little meaning, or by some excessive emphasis or irrev- 
erent delivery of it, that their real meaning is big. 

There is but one philosopher who has ever tried 
to make of irony the same sustained and subtle art 
of holding us in doubt that Socrates did, and that is 
Thorstein Veblen, the author of “The Theory of the 
Leisure Class.” He has not travelled away into a 
city of Birds or Frogs or Gargantuans or Lilliputians 
or Penguins or Angels, or any other of those animal or 
impossible regions, where he might have fun with hu- 
manity by talking about something else. He talks 
about humanity, and he delivers an attack upon its 
follies as profoundly derisive as any we have from the 


54 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


hand of Swift or Voltaire, but he talks a language of 
scientific erudition so remote and abstract and preter- 
naturally non-committal of emotion, that we cannot 
positively declare at any moment whether what he is 
saying is great science, or great irony, or whether per- 
haps it is both. He is a “dissembler” in the original 
sense, a man of whom we long to ask, yet would not 
for the world, how much he seriously means. 

It may have surprised the reader to find irony and 
exaggeration included together as a single general kind 
of humor. It will surprise him more to reflect that the 
two cannot in many cases be distinguished. We may 
say that Socrates understated his knowledge, or that 
he exaggerated his ignorance; we may say that Veblen 
dissembles his emotional meaning, or that he puts up 
a vast pretense of intellectual abstraction. It makes 
no difference, because the quantities involved here 
are intensive rather than extensive. Even in the 
stories of Mark Twain and Rabelais, where the things 
magnified are extensive enough, our perception of 
them is still in our own heads, and we can view them as 
examples of a ridiculous “want of moderation” if we 
choose. And so by a little perceptive shift or casuistry 
any exaggeration may be viewed as irony, and any 
irony as exaggeration, and the view that actually pre- 
vails in a given example is not always easy to deter- 
mine. 

Laurence Sterne tells us in his defense of Hobbies 
about a certain great doctor, Kunastrokius, who at his 
leisure hours took “the greatest delight imaginable in 
combing of asses’ tails, and plucking the hairs out with 


THE HUMOR OF QUANTITY 


55 


his teeth, though he had tweezers always in his pocket.” 
And although I find that concluding phrase, appearing 
with so much inappropriate aplomb at the tag-end of 
so ludicrous a portrait, a delicately humorous thing, 
yet I have never been able to say whether it comes as 
an exaggeration of the great doctor’s devotion, or 
whether it adds a flavor of understatement to what 
had gone before — as though that would have been a 
sufficiently decorous procedure had the tweezers been 
wanting. It is clear only that it disturbs me, not with 
the nature of what has been said — for that I have 
already gathered — but with its degree. 

It needs, then, no special explanation that the word 
irony, having named the jokes which say less in order 
to mean more, came also to include those which say 
more in order to mean less. It came to include all 
kinds of quantitative humor with a point. And since 
quantities that are diminished sufficiently become the 
negative of what they were, it needs no further princi- 
ple to explain those extreme ironies which are state- 
ments neither of less nor more, but of the exact op- 
posite of what they mean. They too are quantitative. 
They provoke our laughter with a minus after letting 
us expect a plus. 

“Ye thought he was a bad man,” said Mr. Dooley, 
“but I knew him for a single-minded innocent ol’ 
la’ad who niver harmed anny wan excipt f’r gain an’ 
was incapable iv falsehood outside iv business.” 

It is obvious that these forms of speech are very 
handy to the purposes of ridicule. And ridicule is so 
handy to the purposes of life, that irony has almost 


56 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


come to mean upon the common tongue a lightly hos- 
tile or satiric speech of any kind. It has lost the fine 
sense of measure that it had. But there is no neces- 
sary connection between irony and the hostile attitude. 
There is no pride nor biting in that exquisite title of 
Charles Lamb’s essay, “On the Inconveniences Re- 
sulting from Being Hanged” — a pure and perfect 
irony. And although Socrates by talking small used 
to triumph greatly over his playmates, we recognize 
the same ironic flavor in Henry Fielding, when he talks 
big in order to humble himself before them. 

“As this is one of those deep observations,” he says, 
“which very few readers can be supposed capable of 
making themselves, I have thought proper to lend them 
my assistance; but this is a favour rarely to be expected 
in the course of my work. Indeed, I shall seldom or 
never so indulge him, unless in such instances as this, 
where nothing but the inspiration with which we 
writers are gifted can possibly enable any one to make 
the discovery.” 

We all employ the art of irony for purposes of 
praise as well as blame. We say, “ He is some dancer ! ” 
and mean by our excessive emphasis upon the slight- 
ness of it, that he is a great deal of a dancer. Or we 
say, “He is a great dancer, he is!” and mean by the 
emphatic repetition that he is little or no dancer at 
all. In both these ironies — conventionalized, but still 
a little playfully alive in spirit — we can see the original 
sense and bearing of the term. We ought to try to be 
as wise as our language, and not let the delicate per- 


THE HUMOR OF QUANTITY 


57 


ceptive flavors of such terms decay. We ought to 
apply the word irony to the simple humor of under- 
statement, in the first place; then let it include jokes, 
whether derisive or not, whose point is the identity of 
saying too little with meaning much; and then jokes 
whose saying too much is a meaning of little; and finally 
those sayings that are directly opposed to their mean- 
ings; and there we ought to stop. For all of these ways 
of joking are distinguished from others by the fact 
that, in depriving us of the goal we originally set out 
after, they do not provide something of alien quality 
in its place, but simply shift back the direction of our 
intention, so that we get either the same thing in 
greater or less degree, or its exact opposite. 

Irony is the humor that we attribute to nature in 
her play with man, because nature is always present- 
ing us with facts. And facts, although extreme and 
exciting enough in their own character, never travel 
very far in the direction of our romantic locutions. 
They come along after we have been talking them up, 
with a decidedly Socratic manner and expression of 
unpretentious adamant, amounting to very little, and 
yet amounting to so much more than all our talk. 
Reality is the supreme artist of understatement, and 
the ironies of Fate wear a most illuminating smile. 
They show very clearly to the pliant-hearted what 
the point of a joke is, for they offer us in the form of 
humility the very prize that we were grabbing in the 
form of pride. 


CHAPTER IX 
PRACTICAL HUMOR 

A painful or unpleasant feeling may arise in us in 
two different ways. It may arise from our losing or 
failing to attain an experience that we want, and it 
may arise from our receiving an experience that we 
do not want. A similar distinction can be drawn 
among the forms of that play-effigy of pain which we 
call humorous emotion. There is a humor of disap- 
pointment, properly so called — and this was what Kant 
observed when he said that laughter arises from “a 
strained expectation that is suddenly brought to noth- 
ing.” And there is a humor of disturbance, or the 
playfully disagreeable — and this was observed by Aris- 
totle, who defined the laughable as the “harmlessly 
ugly.” Kant did not explain why any disappointment 
should ever give us pleasure, and Aristotle did not tell 
how the ugly could ever actually be “harmless,” but 
each of these philosophers perceived one aspect of the 
veritable essence of the sense of humor. 

When our playful trend is forward to some end or 
object of interest, and we are simply tripped up, or 
dropped into a trap, or left staring at nothing, the 
humor that results is of a rather hard and prosaic 
quality, as all feelings are that occur in a mood of 
enterprise. And if we give to this the name of prac- 

58 


PRACTICAL HUMOR 


59 


tical humor, we shall appropriately distinguish it from 
that more liquid and irradiant feeling that arises when 
some present object, or some group of qualities actu- 
ally perceived, is laughable. I think that the words 
absurdity and comic and wit and joke apply rather to 
the practical kind of humor, and the words ludicrous, 
and comical, and droll, and humorous are used oftener 
of the poetic. 

Those imps and April witlings whose main end of 
being lies in the elaborate bedevilment of their neigh- 
bors, will see that I do not mean by practical humor 
what they mean by a practical joke. They mean a 
prepared contrivance for getting playful enjoyment 
out of the serious discomfiture of others. And in so 
far as these contrivances are humorous, and not merely 
a direct overflow of neighborly hostility, their humor 
is, of course, practical. But practical humor, in the 
large sense in which I contrast it with humor that is 
poetic, need not be deliberately perpetrated, nor does 
it require the discomfiture of others. It requires only 
the discomfiture, in some purposeful creature, of a 
practical tendency, and the presence of some humorous 
creature, whether the same one or another, who is 
able to take that event playfully. The advantage of 
having these discomfitures befall others, and ourselves 
receiving them only as in a kind of emotional mirror, 
is that we are then very free to take them playfully. 
We are relieved of the shock, and we do not have to 
consider the consequences. The range of our enjoy- 
ment is thus enormously increased — although even here 


60 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


sympathy sets a bound, and we are not most of us 
able to perceive any loss entailing real anguish as hu- 
morous, unless the persons involved are far away, or 
long dead, or imaginary, and we merely hear the tale 
of their troubles. But whether the joke is on us or 
Saint Anthony, the interior result in its negative aspect 
is essentially the same. It is a disappointment which 
for some reason we are able to take playfully. And 
nothing will lead us wider astray from the psychology 
of practical humor than the opinion that we are able 
to take playfully only the disappointments of others. 

“One can always make a child laugh,” said Leon 
Dumont, “by pointing to a spot upon its clothes 
that does not exist !” And that is the elementary 
atom of a jest — a thing at which we and not the child 
should laugh, if looking down upon others were the 
essence of the beauty of such things. For my part, I 
have found the most hilarious of practical laughter to 
arise when all of those present are involved in the 
same predicament, and the humor is increased through 
sympathetic reverberation without the possibility of 
derision. Suppose, for example, that the whole family 
have got all dressed up in their Sunday clothes, and 
boarded a two-seated vehicle in the direction of the 
village church; and suppose that the horse does not 
concur in the piety of the general intention, but re- 
fuses to move out of his tracks. Then all these elab- 
orate preparations, and the continued obtrusion of a 
purpose in their still sitting the way that was to be 
forward, begin to enlarge themselves and display them- 


PRACTICAL HUMOR 


61 


selves, until they succeed in giving to that mere ab- 
sence of an event a quality that is positively and enor- 
mously comic. The young brother jumps out to 
gather some straw, and lights a fire under the horse, 
thinking to demonstrate the well-advertised superi- 
ority of man over nature, and the horse feeling his 
belly ache backs them all up into the barn. There is 
little that being left out of it could add to the glory 
of that situation. 

It is an absurd situation. And absurdity, I believe, 
is the best general name we can choose for that humor 
of a practical kind which is purely negative, or in which 
the positive values are too fine and vaporous to be 
identified. It is a “reduction to absurdity” of the 
whole attitude of our wills. In the particular kind of 
activity called thinking, however, a special name has 
already been applied to these practical comings-to- 
nothing. They have been called bulls. And because 
it is so hard to understand why we should enjoy a mere 
nothing, they have usually been imputed to a people 
we like to laugh about, and called Irish bulls. But it 
seems likely that this word was derived in the first 
place from the Latin bulla, which means a bubble. 
And an Irish bull may very well be defined as any 
remark which appears rotund and meaningful enough, 
until our apprehension actually arrives upon it, when 
there is simply nothing there. Its plausibility is the 
only thing to distinguish it from pure nonsense. But 
this plausibility can be so finely and fancifully devel- 
oped as of itself to have a colored charm, and then the 


62 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


nothing can be landed in our laps with so dexterous 
and graceful a temper of playfulness, that we would 
be glad to have these bubbles blown before us all day 
long. It is a genius for such glowing light logical ab- 
surdities — a genius for making fairy-delicate plausibili- 
ties out of intellectual nothing — that gives much of its 
unique flavor to the humor of Lewis Carroll in “Alice 
in Wonderland.” It is the kind of humor that we 
might naturally expect of a mathematician at play. 

“‘What sort of things do you remember best?’ Alice 
ventured to ask. 

“‘Oh — things that happened the week after next/ 
the Queen replied in a careless tone. ‘For instance 
now/ she went on, sticking a large piece of plaster on 
her finger as she spoke, ‘ there’s the King’s Messenger. 
He’s in prison now being punished; and the trial 
doesn’t even begin till next Wednesday: and of course 
the crime comes last of all.’ 

“‘Suppose he never commits the crime?’ said Alice. 

“‘That would be all the better, wouldn’t it?’ the 
Queen said, as she bound the plaster round her finger 
with a bit of ribbon.” 

Kant was right in insisting that it must be an abso- 
lute nothing into which our practical expectation is 
transformed, if we are to laugh with humor. It must 
be a nothing — or at least a worth nothing — from the 
standpoint of that expectation. But if from some 
other standpoint the nothing turns out to be also 
something, then we have still the absurdity, the humor 
of the bull, and we have this positive thing besides. 


PRACTICAL HUMOR 


63 


And such happy combinations, when they are delib- 
erately perpetrated in conversation, we describe as 
wit. A witty joker may be likened to a man who, 
having hidden a gold piece beside the path we are 
treading, or having discovered at least that one lies 
hidden there, contrives to trip us up in such a way 
that we shall find it. To stumble and find something 
is to enjoy a joke. 

Cicero tells us how his friend Nasica avenged him- 
self upon a Roman gentleman by the name of Ennius, 
upon whom he had paid a call. He had been in- 
formed by the maid that Ennius was not at home; 
and when it came about that Ennius called upon him, 
he stuck his head out of the window and said: “I am 
not at home.” 

“What are you talking about?” said Ennius. 
“Don’t I know your voice?” 

“Why, you rascal,” said Nasica, “I believed your 
maid when she told me you were not at home, and 
you won’t believe me even when I tell you myself !” 

Is not this classical Latin joke most obviously, in 
the mere form of argument, an Irish bull — a piece of 
logically plausible and yet complete nonsense? But 
even while we enjoy that nonsense, do we not enjoy 
also a certain vague sense that pervades it — a kind of 
diffused vapor-douche of the short and ugly shot one 
might direct at Ennius under the circumstances? So 
it is that “comings to nothing” and “sudden glories” 
are combined in the most common form of adult 
fighting play; and so it is that two such utterly diverse 


64 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


opinions as those of Hobbes and Kant about the cause 
of laughter could stand up with equal authority so 
long as they have. 

Repartee is the name we give to this common form 
of play, and the rules of the game might be laid down 
somewhat as follows: One of the contestants pro- 
pounds a thesis which gives glory to himself, or igno- 
miny to his opponent; his opponent so manipulates 
the implications of that thesis that the propounder’s 
glory disappears, and his own appears in its place; 
the propounder then further manipulates it, if he can, 
to restore his own glory; and so on, until one or the 
other of them cries enough. An example which figures 
in the translation of Freud’s book about wit is the 
reply of Charles Sumner to a minister who asked him 
impertinently why he did not go into the South with 
his antislavery speeches where slavery exists. His 
reply was: “You are trying to save souls from hell, 
aren’t you? Why don’t you go there?” 

Freud would have us believe that the pith of this 
wit lies in the “eluding of a censorship,” the saying of 
a thing indirectly which good manners would otherwise 
prohibit. And we must acknowledge that such a thing 
is accomplished — it was a very genteel way of telling 
a minister to go to hell. But nobody not occupied 
with proving a theory could possibly identify its gen- 
tility with its humor. Humor lay in the fact that the 
minister went to hell on the wings of his own logic. 
His condemnation of Sumner was not answered; it 
was not contradicted; it was simply brought to noth- 


PRACTICAL HUMOR 


65 


ing, and Sumner’s condemnation of him allowed to 
appear in its place — a victory according to the essen- 
tial rules of the game. Many people are free from 
the censorship of good manners, but few would not 
prefer that jocular victory to the sober damnation of 
an opponent. 

A form of enjoyment that is very far away from 
these quips and privy taunts is our enjoyment of the 
naive. And it requires a very generous theory of 
humor to bring the naive blunder in under its shelter 
without crowding out the witty joke. The trick has 
given much idle occupation to the philosophers of 
laughter. And if our own theory proves capable of 
this ample spread of wing, it is because, in the first 
place, we refuse to be entirely carried away by that 
sophisticated distinction between our own experience 
and the observed experience of others, and in the second 
place, we recur always to the words pleasure and dis- 
pleasure, or to no less general names of feeling, in 
giving our account both of humor and of jokes. A 
naive blunder can be shown to give a shock which 
might he displeasure to those who enjoy its humor, 
and to give a rich and positive pleasure besides. 

Remember, for example, the schoolboy who de- 
fined a marsupial upon his examination paper as “an 
animal who has a pouch in the middle of his stomach 
into which he can retire when he is hard pressed.” 
That is absurd in the same perfectly logical way that 
the humor of Lewis Carroll is absurd. It is, in fact, 
an “Irish bull.” But it is more than that, for besides 


66 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


failing to deliver the proposed meaning to our critical 
judgment, it does present some other thing to our 
affectionate attention. It presents that schoolboy 
himself, earnestly and anxiously trying to remember 
his text-book — the words “hard pressed” being a 
stock in trade with all text-books. We see him bend- 
ing over his paper, personifying and continuing before 
our eyes, in spite of logic, physiology, and all else to the 
contrary, the original meaningful impulse which he has 
aroused and disappointed, and we have a rare oppor- 
tunity to enjoy his innocence. Surely there is nothing 
in the nature of humor to prevent that enjoyment, or 
dry up the feeling of tender sympathy with which any 
creature having a human heart must see the picture 
of a child undergoing an examination. So far from 
scorning him, we love him suddenly. We resolve that 
he shall be remembered among the martyrs who have 
suffered greatly for the happiness of mankind. And 
beside him, for the still further illumination of pos- 
terity, the little girl who said that “ Saturnalia was the 
name of the wolf that suckled Romeo and Juliette.” 

These blunders are beautiful. And naive absurdities 
are often more beautiful, even when they are not more 
humorous, than absurdities of the voluntary kind. 
They offer us a variety of positive satisfactions which 
the clown or the deliberate wit-snapper can only sim- 
ulate — the satisfaction of loving an innocent mind, as 
in the example I have discussed; or the satisfaction 
of glorying over it, as in the classic theory; or as Freud 
tells us, the satisfaction of realizing through it some 


PRACTICAL HUMOR 


67 


wished-for thing which our own sophistication forbids. 
Any of these affirmative values may flow in to enrich 
our enjoyment of a naive blunder. But even in the 
blunder itself there is a special shining out of comic 
color, because it is not only humor in the midst of 
play that suddenly appears, but playful humor in the 
midst of serious life. For a similar reason we laugh 
more generously at a humorous thing which “really 
happened” than at the same thing if it is offered as a 
“funny story” — a fact which comic editors need to 
have perpetually in mind. A naive absurdity actually 
observed, or related to us while in a mood of serious 
belief, has the special virtue of lightning when the 
clouds are dark. A sudden rift, and a bright flood of 
illuminating laughter breaks over us, as though we 
heard the bell ring for recess in the midst of our les- 
sons. We are at play, but real life is our plaything. 

The form of practical wit most utterly remote from 
this beautifully humorous condition is the play upon 
words, the pun. Indeed there has always been some 
dispute among the captains and superintendents of 
polite laughter as to whether there can be humor in a 
pun — and whether we may be permitted to smile, for 
instance, at that answer of one of Thomas Hood’s 
heroes to his wife’s attempt to fortify him against his 
sorrows : 

“I know I’m not so fortified, nor fiftyfied, as you.” 

For my part I think we ought to be allowed a slight 
liberty of choice in this matter, and that a sharp dif- 


68 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


ference ought to be recognized between those puns 
which rely too much upon their negative action, and 
those which offer some good strong joy in the recov- 
ery. The negative action of a pun in its purity is, of 
course, merely the nonsensical use of a word or sylla- 
ble — a thing which Shakespeare seems to have been 
childlike enough to enjoy, but which we do not recog- 
nize, as we do mere conceptual absurdities, with a 
special name. We call verbal absurdities puns only 
when they offer, besides the humor of pure nonsense, 
some reasonable excuse for their intrusion — some 
meaning in another sense, or at least some vocal like- 
ness or identity with a thing already said. We need 
not pay them much respect, however, unless they go 
beyond the point of reasonable excuse, and give us a 
warm recompense. For their intrusion is in a peculiar 
way graceless and out of true connection with our life. 

Words are in ordinary speech merely the material 
carriers of meaning or image or emotion. They are 
containers, necessary but negligible, and our attention 
is not directed upon them. We do not “expect” them 
to do their work appropriately, but just assume they 
will. And when they fail, no matter how dexterously 
the failure may be arranged, we do not experience a 
simple and immediate disappointment. We have 
rather to abandon our whole expectation, and begin 
over in a more shallow attitude in which we can realize 
the part played in it by these containers. For that 
reason a verbal absurdity cannot be briefly and di- 
rectly felt as humorous experience, and even the pun 


PRACTICAL HUMOR 


69 


with a point — the failure of a particle of speech to 
mean one thing combined with its success in meaning 
another — startles our admiration more than it stim- 
ulates our sense of humor. It is not a part of what 
we are doing. It requires a pause, an act of recogni- 
tion. Even in the most loose and foolish of hilarious 
discourse, a pun comes a little alien, like the attempts 
at congeniality of a drunkard or of a person whose 
reason is slightly touched. Indeed there are forms of 
insanity in which the deeper associations of words 
seem to become dried up, and a “flight of ideas” oc- 
curs, which is like the racing of a motor disgeared from 
the machine it was intended to move, and in this con- 
dition puns are sometimes seen to fly off in the most 
extraordinary swarms and galaxies. It is a condition 
that any one can reproduce by forcing himself to talk 
more rapidly than he can think; he will then see in 
what kind of mind it is that these verbal sports have 
a natural and substantial flavor. 

King James the First seems to have had a mind of 
this sort, and to have been so addicted to the idiotic 
fun it supplied him, that he would not promote any 
one to high place in the English kingdom who had not 
some skill and fertility as a punster. The result was 
an elegant epidemic, in which by means of social sug- 
gestion puns acquired a value which was not in any way 
connected with humorous emotion. As Addison tells 
us, the pun was now “delivered with great gravity 
from the pulpit, or pronounced in the most solemn 
manner at the council table. The greatest authors, 


70 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


in their most serious works, made frequent use of puns. 
The sermons of Bishop Andrews, and the tragedies of 
Shakespeare are full of them. . . . The sinner was 
punned into repentance.” It is sad to record that, in 
spite of Addison’s hygienic advice and example, Eng- 
land has not yet altogether recovered from this afflic- 
tion, and these obtrusions of the vocable show a degree 
of social and literary audacity upon that island which 
they have never attained, to my knowledge, in any 
other part of the planet. At least I count it a point 
of legitimate pride in my own country, infested though 
it is with that other little superfecund pest of inheri- 
tance from the Court of Saint James, the English spar- 
row, that it has, upon the whole, and within the limits 
provided by law, manfully resisted the transplantation 
and general propagation of the household pun. I do 
not believe there is any American of literary sensi- 
bility who will not be pained or touched with a sympa- 
thetic embarrassment to find one of these hard, shal- 
low bumps in the fluid texture of that most wonderful 
passage of Charles Lamb “On Burial Societies; and 
the Character of an Undertaker.” 

To provide ourselves a bier, he tells us, we curtail 
ourselves of beer. 

It fills the whole form and definition of a joke. 
There is a meaninglessness in one way of taking the 
word he has italicized, a meaningfulness in the other 
— a nothing and a something, a disappointment and 
a satisfaction. But there is no grace of absurdity 
borne onward by a wave of delight, because the event 


PRACTICAL HUMOR 


71 


has not happened in the sphere of our actual enterprise, 
which was not a perceiving of words but a conceiving 
of ideas. We are made aware that a joke has been 
perpetrated, but denied the pleasure of its intimate 
experience. We have something to forgive as tra- 
ducing, rather than to enjoy as disappointing our 
expectation. And for this act of clemency we ask a 
fair consideration. We demand that a pun shall do 
something more upon the affirmative side than merely 
make a little sense. Only when that demand is hand- 
somely met do we admit a pun among the most illus- 
trious of those “darlings of absurdity” to be described 
as practical jokes. 


CHAPTER X 
POETIC HUMOR 

People who feel affectionate toward daffodils call 
them daffodillies, and I suppose that people who feel 
the same way toward crocodiles call them crocodillies, 
although I have never met any such people. I will 
assume that the reader at least has no such deep at- 
tachment in this direction as would blind him to a 
certain inappropriateness combined with the appro- 
priateness of the word. It is a feeling word that does 
not fit. And that is a thing most obviously to be de- 
scribed as poetic humor. For poetry always speaks in 
words that feel. It speaks in words that cherish the 
qualities of things, and bring them forth shiningly into 
the mind. Poetry is the art of calling names, and 
poetic humor is a playful disconcertion of this art. 
To call whiskey “fire-water” is poetic; and to call 
Apollinaris “this water that tastes like your foot’s 
asleep” is poetic also, but with a tincture of the im- 
possible that makes it humorous. 

Aside from the hypnotic assistance of rhythm, 
there are two methods by which poetic language makes 
vivid our realization of things. It chooses some salient 
detail or flavor in those things upon which we may 
focus our attention; and it compares those things with 
others which are similar in some salient detail or flavor. 

72 


POETIC HUMOR 


73 


In poetic humor we can distinguish these same two 
arts — an art of inappropriate choice and an art of 
incongruous comparison. 

When Dante describes a saint who has come down 
from heaven as “One who left off singing hallelujahs,” 
he is naming his object by means of the salient detail. 
And when O. Henry speaks of a metropolitan charac- 
ter as “One at whose bidding many lobsters had per- 
ished,” he is doing the same thing. The poetry of 
the first expression lies in the appropriateness of the 
detail spoken to array round itself as a centre all the 
other qualities of the thing it names. The humor of 
the second lies in a certain objective possibility of its 
doing that, combined with an emotional impossibility. 
We feel that a human being can hardly be designated 
by so accidental an attribute, or that if he can, then 
the designation ought not to be applied with so much 
rhetorical dignity. It is a playfully inappropriate 
choice. 

When Burns tells us that 

“Like winds in summer sighing. 

Her voice is low and sweet,” 

we are moved by the congruity of these two things to 
realize them both the more perfectly. But when 
Aristophanes tells us that an eminent statesman “has 
a voice like a pig on fire,” we receive into our conscious- 
ness two emotional atmospheres so negative to each 
other that they fall apart with an explosion. It is a 
playfully incongruous comparison. 


74 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


These two simple acts of choice and comparison 
underlie and explain all the forms of poetic language 
which grammarians call “figures of speech” — synec- 
doche, metonymy, metaphor, simile, all those incom- 
prehensible terrors of the classroom. And just as the 
language of Shakespeare is packed full of these poetic 
figures in the intense, bold, delicate, wanton extremity 
of their perfection, so the language of Rabelais is packed 
full of them in a state of contortion, magnification, 
syncope, insanity, sudden collapse, and general dis- 
combobulation, injury and disability of existence, that 
is among the supreme wonders of literature. The hu- 
morous names of Rabelais and the poetic names of 
Shakespeare — these two things come nearest in natural 
miracle to the invention of language itself. 

Of course it is not only names but also things that 
are poetically humorous. In actual life as well as in 
imagination we attempt to realize the being of things, 
and find ourselves balked by some rift or inhospitality 
in their structure. Either they contain too much 
of the ugly, the dreadful, the disgusting, for us to realize 
with serious enjoyment, or else they contain elements 
so contradictory according to the judgment of our 
habits, that they will not “run together” in percep- 
tion — they are incongruous. And this external disaster, 
being playfully accepted, gives rise to the same warm 
laughter, many-colored and tinctured with all the 
varieties of emotion and sensation, as the language of 
the humorous poet. 

Indeed there is no better way to portray the gradual 


POETIC HUMOR 


75 


and yet great difference between practical and poetic 
humor than by recalling the development of that 
quaint figure of pity-comedy created by Charlie Chap- 
lin in the moving pictures. He began his career un- 
der the rod of the commercial manager as an amazingly 
agile and original clown, a little big-footed, semi- 
mechanical manikin with a gift for blundering when we 
expected him to succeed, and succeeding when we ex- 
pected him to fail. His enterprising misadventures 
followed each other with the rapidity of bullets fired out 
of a machine-gun, keeping us in a state of narrative sus- 
pense too strenuous and perpetual for any poetic drink- 
ing in of qualities in scene and character. We carried 
home only the general memory of a violent state of 
busyness, a little man forever in a new hurry, stumbling 
on every pebble of his tread, and yet continually ar- 
riving too, and winding up in a pure whirlwind of 
action and reaction with some great joyful or dis- 
astrous bang at the end. We might say that the con- 
crete material of those pictures, the people, scene, 
and situation, served only the purpose of arousing a 
sufficient interest in the question what was to be done. 

But a poet was acting in them, and after the author- 
ity of a manager and the commercial pressure w r ere 
removed, he began to give rein to his native interest in 
those materials for their own sake. He allowed the 
presence of qualities as well as the accomplishment of 
deeds to occupy time. He filled his pictures full of 
rich and moving incongruities of mood and character 
and situation, amid which he himself, without chang- 


76 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


ing the quaint garb of the buffoon days, began to 
acquire a quality of soft and curious pathos. A be- 
wildered wistful genius in low circumstance, he is, 
moving with all our pity and delight through a series 
of experiences wrought together with exquisite sense 
for the ludicrous, the droll, the confluence of incom- 
patible emotions. The “gags” no longer consist 
only of new ways to fall down and find something; 
they consist of new kinds of inappropriateness in atti- 
tude and gesture and expression. Indeed a gift for 
acting as though a present thing were something else, 
and acting so vividly that the absent thing flashes 
actually before us too, is almost the essential principle 
in Charlie Chaplin’s art. He is not a “funny man.” 
He is not even exactly a comedian. He is a humorqjus 
poet who happens also to be a great actor — a master 
of mimetic gesture and expression. It is this union of 
two perfect gifts that has enabled him, without ever 
speaking a word, to arrive at a place of renown in the 
world’s adoration that might be envied by Santa 
Claus. 

What could be more inherently laughable, for in- 
stance, supposing it is enacted with the perfect realism 
of the barnyard, than the picture of an angel picking 
its feathers? It combines in a single perception two 
groups of associated ideas and feelings so lively and 
yet so incompatible, and it combines them with such 
irresistible plausibility, that we can neither deny it 
nor receive it into the existing habits of our mind. 
We must either humorously laugh, or give up the hope 


POETIC HUMOR 77 

of remaining alive in this perception. And that is 
the characteristic of all truly poetic humor. 

Those who think that laughter is composed of scorn 
are accustomed to describe these incongruities as ex- 
amples of the “degradation” of a felt value. They 
will say here that the reminiscence of a hen-house brings 
a kind of disgrace or defilement of honor to an angel, 
and that our laughter is a gleeful exultation at his fall. 
But they could find in these same comedies, if they 
chose to, examples in which the intruding reminiscence 
is on a perfect par of honor with the actual scene — as 
when a stack of pancakes is counted and divided like a 
roll of bills. And they could find examples in which 
the reminiscence is incongruous because it gives too 
much honor to the present object — as when the actor 
lifts his hat deferentially to a cow upon seizing her teats, 
as though offering a somewhat dubious courtesy to a 
lady. It is true that humor depends upon playful- 
ness and implies it, and for that reason the intrusion 
of something too intensely solemn or devout cannot 
be humorously perceived, no matter what it may 
intrude upon. Both ends of a simile that is humorous 
must be lightly taken. But beyond that there need 
be no downward tendency. There need be no ten- 
dency at all, no choice implied, no judgment rendered. 
And for the most there is none in these pictures. It 
is just the perpetual streaming out of quaint, odd, 
grotesque, jolly-foolish, droll, and fantastic mixtures 
of the qualities of experience that gives them so poetic a 
popularity. The incidents most laughed at have no 


78 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


value but the pleasure of that laugh. They stand in 
the same relation to poetic jokes that absurdity does 
to practical jokes. And the comic emotion they cre- 
ate, although more lingering and vari-colored, and 
capable of being objectified, so that it seems a quality 
in the things instead of an element in our perception, 
is still the pure feeling of playful pain. It is the un- 
mixed and original action of our sense of humor. 

Humor of this kind does acquire a point, however, 
and may be suitably described as a “joke” when the 
disappointment of our poetic or idle impulse to per- 
ceive, is so managed as to bring either a meaning to 
our minds or a satisfaction to some underlying current 
of choice between the two things offered to our atten- 
tion. It is this underlying current, for example, that 
gives durability to the memory of that little old lady 
who went to church one Sunday morning, stepping 
quietly and soberly down the aisle, leaned over an 
elderly gentleman in one of the front rows, and asked 
him in a loud whisper: “Is this pie occupewed?” 
Few apparently pointless jokes have survived so long 
and travelled so far in the conversational lore of a 
people as that one has in the United States. Any- 
where else in the world it might have been recalled 
once or twice, I should imagine, and then forgotten. 
But to us who were so early compelled to go to church, 
and to go to a very Protestant church where a solemn 
behavior was required of us in absence of the sensuous 
conditions of solemn feeling, to us the relief of tension 
involved here seems to have been so great as to con- 


POETIC HUMOR 79 

stitute a positive joy, and we preserve this blunt joke 
as carefully as though it had a point. 

An immense variety of laughable anecdotes can be 
remembered, however, of which this little old lady’s 
misadventure is typical — amazing and fine things that 
have happened in the midst of prayer, keen remarks 
that little children have made about God, shoving up 
of little buds of reality through the vain show of wed- 
dings, christenings, patriotic celebrations, Sunday- 
school lessons, prayer-meetings, burial excursions, 
visits of the bishop. Rabelais carried these jokes to 
the extreme to which all good things ought to go in 
the twenty-second chapter of his book “ Pantagruel,” 
in which a pious lady attends to her prayers, and what 
befalls her is so contrary to the expected blessings of 
God upon the devout, that I leave it to the reader to 
find out for himself at a time when his curiosity some- 
what exceeds his piety and refinement. 

There is in the breast of every one of us a little child 
who has never absolutely accepted these adult solem- 
nities, or agreed upon their awful and transcendent 
value, and it is the pleasure of the unchaining of this 
child that flows in upon the body of our surprise, 
and makes a complete joke out of what would other- 
wise be but a ludicrous interruption. We receive a 
satisfaction that is really more exalted than the ful- 
filment of our pious intention, and better for our 
health too. It is the satisfaction of feeling free. And 
humorous liberty is so definite and delightful a quality 
of feeling that it too has been made the basis of a 


80 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


definition of humor, and all laughter has been explained 
as a kind of declaration of independence upon the part 
of the nervous system. But “liberty” is only another 
way of describing the things of which we are perpetu- 
ally deprived. And any of these things may be re- 
lied upon to reinforce our laughter at a poetic incon- 
gruity, as well as at a practical disappointment. They 
all seem to combine together indeed — liberty, and hos- 
tility, and truth, and even a sexual interest adheres 
to them — in the case of the man who was compelled 
to ride to his wife’s funeral in the same carriage with 
his mother-in-law, and all protests and evasions hav- 
ing ultimately failed, he leaned over the wheel and 
growled at the funeral director: “Well, you’ve spoiled 
the day for me, that’s all ! ” It is the perfect inept- 
ness of that form of words to the flavor of the occasion, 
that makes so humorous its aptness for the expression 
of certain eternal if not very tactful underpropensities 
of the broken heart. 

Of all the values that may loom up in the midst 
of a poetic ineptitude, the most charmingly surprising 
is poetic truth from some other point of view. For 
it happens that the external world is so indeterminate, 
or so patient of our whims, that it is quite willing to 
be a great many different things according as we choose 
to perceive it. It is only a question of the posture of 
our eyes and feelings, for example, whether Turner’s 
famous painting in the Boston Museum is properly to 
be described as a picture of “The Slave-Ship,” or of 
“A tortoise-shell cat having a fit in a platter of toma- 


POETIC HUMOR 


81 


toes.” There is the action of the poet in both names. 
And this is true, not only of oil-paintings, but also of 
the most interesting creations of nature. We might be 
watching with a child’s romantic admiration a parade 
of nature’s wonders through the village street, and 
some more realistic friend might whisper that an ele- 
phant walks as though his pants were coming down. 
And although that ludicrously disturbs our own poetry 
of elephants, we see that it is accurate, and in the 
second ripple of our laughter we become the poets of 
its truth. To be able to perceive the world in many 
different ways, and in each receive it with the poet’s 
love of all experience, is perhaps a danger in the moral 
fibre, but it is a gift that adds deep joys of color to our 
humorous laughter. It is the gift of those who have a 
quick imaginative sympathy, and it makes them seem 
to be laughing a little all the time when they are not 
in tears, for they are seeing life’s incidents continually 
with the eyes of others while they see them with their 
own. 

It is clear, then, that poetic jokes do not differ 
from practical ones in the variety and high potency of 
their points. They differ in their more enduring 
ability to provoke laughter without a point. A mere 
incongruity, like the picture conveyed in these lines, 

“So very deaf was my grandfather Squeers, 

That he had to wear lightning-rods over his ears, 

To hear even thunder, and oftentimes then 
He was forced to request it to thunder again,” 


82 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


will tickle us into laughter more strongly and more 
often than a mere bull, or vacancy of meaning, be- 
cause it presents to us an actual thing and not just 
the absence of it. And for that reason the poetic 
humorist, when great and significant incongruities 
fail him, is less at a loss than the practical wit. He 
can fall back upon the crude flow of materials, and 
pass the time in mere horse-play or general tom- 
foolery, relying upon the fact that to an aroused imagi- 
nation a little tinged with the relics of previous hilar- 
ity, the very presentation of existence, the queer com- 
binations of attributes which hobble upon the stage 
of reality and make their lame attempt to be things, 
is enough to beget humorous laughter. 

Especially in America our habits seem to be tolerant 
toward this form of relaxation. I remember a time 
when the Mayor of New York told some young ladies 
graduating from a seminary that the proper way to fix 
an egg so that a man can eat it, is to put it in boiling 
water and boil it for four minutes; and this little article 
of faith fell under the eye of the “funny man” em- 
ployed by the New York World, who for two weeks 
thereafter filled a column and a half a day with all 
manner of theses, dissertations, arguments, sermons, 
exhortations, epistolary disquisitions, field reports, 
laboratory findings, diagrams, maps, pictures, and sta- 
tistics, to the amusement of a whole city. It was not 
because he had anything very witty to say about boil- 
ing eggs, but because he had the poetic sense to per- 
ceive that the intrinsic qualities of an egg — its history, 


POETIC HUMOR 


83 


its connections, its possible career, its non-committal 
expression combined with a liability to blossom sud- 
denly — offer a wealth of immediate material to the 
faculty of humorous perception. One of the letters 
he received put up a vain pretense that eggs are not 
humorous. 

“Egg Editor, 

“The New York World: [it ran] 

“Dear Sir: 

“ I want to express my sympathy with you in your 
unsuccessful effort to extract humor from an egg. I 
don’t blame you. Ever since we moved out on the 
farm I’ve been trying to find out what there is about 
an egg to cackle over. I think the truth is that an egg 
looks funny, but really isn’t. Of course all this talk 
about hard-boiled eggs is pure nonsense. It doesn’t 
matter how hard you boil an egg, the question is how 
long. When you get right down to common sense, 
there is no such thing as a boiled egg. You can’t boil 
an egg. An egg hardens below the boiling point. All 
you can do is to boil the water around it, and you can 
do that just as well before, or after, or without putting 
the egg in at all.” 

If there is any ground for the opinion that the Ameri- 
cans have “ a different sense of humor ” from the British, 
it is a difference in the direction of their tolerance. 
The British are more interested in intellectual life than 
we are, and that interest renders them tolerant toward 


84 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


intellectual silliness. But they have also an ideal of 
emotional restraint, a cult of hypocritical coolness, 
that makes them frown down upon any mere ludicrous 
uproar as somewhat provincial, frowning through an 
eye-glass which itself looks so funny to us we can 
hardly hold in until we get back to New York. In 
New York all kinds of loose and inebriate foolishness 
is accepted, but those puns and little lingual and 
cerebral jigs and jocules so dear to the cultivated 
British, are greeted by us with the symptoms of serious 
pain. 

It was in America, I think, that the poetic “ humor- 
ist ” as a professional character was first baptized 
with that name. He is not a satirist, nor a clown, 
nor a comedian, nor in any sense a resurrected court 
fool or jester. He has not enough wit or agility for 
that. He is a man of naturally droll mind and rather 
uncouth magnetism, who simply stands up and talks. 
He makes everything he talks about seem funny with- 
out cracking jokes about it. It seems funny because 
he is funny. He is inappropriate. Everything he 
does or has to do with is inappropriate. The harle- 
quin dresses himself up in order to make people laugh, 
but the humorist, knowing that all mankind is dressed 
up, achieves the same end by coming out in his own 
clothes. If there is any point in his humor, it is a 
kind of lovable honesty which underlies all that inap- 
propriateness — not a profound honesty, perhaps, but 
honest provincialism in a society much overstraining 
the effort to escape it. Artemus Ward was one of the 


POETIC HUMOR 


85 


founders of this tradition, which achieved a great 
height of art and personality in Mark Twain, whose 
innocence was aggressive, and his provincialism one 
of the gayest, great oaken broadswords with which 
the idols and elegances of the centres of culture were 
ever wantonly assailed. 


CHAPTER XI 
GOOD AND BAD JOKES 

The day may come when some insuppressible classi- 
ficator, a kind of scholastic joculary entomologist, 
equipped with an eyepiece and a bottle of chloro- 
form, will go about collecting all the different kinds of 
jokes and puns and whims and twits and follies, and 
all the nameless little light-winged forms of “smile 
talk” that the ingenious hand of evolution may un- 
fold, pin them down in a great book with names de- 
rived from the all-suffering Latin, one each for the 
genus, species, family, order, tribe to which they sev- 
erally belong, and so endow the mighty steel-ribbed 
shelves of the libraries of this world with a new and 
monumental science. It will be a science upon which 
those who are addicted to labor can practise their 
vice without fear of ever exhausting the material. 
For here we have already, with our distinction between 
simple humor and jokes with a point, and between the 
two currents of value, positive and negative, which 
constitute the point of a joke, and between poetic 
and practical, quantitative and qualitative humor — 
we have already laid ground for enough permutations 
and combinations to fill with their illustration many 
laborious volumes. And we have not even mentioned 
the well-known distinction between dry humor and 

86 


GOOD AND BAD JOKES 


87 


wet, or between salt wit and sweet, or made half the 
trouble that might be made out of that between comic 
action and the humor that is conveyed in words. 
Undoubtedly a deep and stupendous task is here al- 
ready in outline. And there remains the fact that 
when we are once inwardly frivolized, and rendered a 
little inanely hysterical, as we certainly shall be before 
we have finished perusing one of these vast works, we 
will laugh at anything at all that is mentioned — and so 
in the end the learned professor will find himself com- 
pelled to classify all things that are, and he will have 
to kill and chloroform the whole universe and pin 
down the very wings of time, in order to complete 
his science and be sure that everything laughable is 
ordered and understood as it should be. 

It is not my purpose even to make a beginning of 
this exalted work in the present chapter. I shall 
merely venture to designate one little minor difference 
which that ultimate compilation will no doubt very 
justly ignore — the difference between good jokes and 
bad. Whether it is a sheer lack of moral enthusiasm, 
or an inability to plumb the thing to its depths, the 
fact is that no one who has ever written upon this sub- 
ject has offered any rule or precept by which we might, 
without risking some terrible public disgrace and 
exposure, choose in advance between the good and 
the bad. No technique has ever been established, no 
lessons given, no schools founded, no text-books, no 
lectureships, no missionaries sent among the infantile 
and the depraved, to explain how to avoid the pale 


88 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


fizzle and bring on the jovial cheer. It has all been 
left to chance and divine empirical guesswork. And 
yet it is quite possible, I believe, to diagnose the infirmi- 
ties of jokes that are bad, and tell what are the fine 
points of a joke that is good. And by concentrating 
the attention of certain bright wits and village cut-ups 
upon the extreme delicacy of these latter points, it 
might even lie within the scope of mortality to reduce 
the number of their delinquencies and the incredible 
glibness with which they commit them. I will, there- 
fore, lay down the first eight laws of a code for serious 
joke-makers. 


Law Number One 

There must he a real engagement of the interest of the 
•person who is expected to laugh. 

This would seem obvious enough, were it not that 
so many of those serious persons who have elected 
themselves philosophers of the comic have been under 
the impression that laughter is a purely intellectual 
product. Seeing that humor is playful and has little 
to do with their own industrious feelings, they have 
jumped to the conclusion that it is “logical” or “cere- 
bral,” and has nothing to do with the feelings at all. 
But as we have observed that play is an instinctive 
condition, and that humor itself is a feeling, nothing 
appears more certain than that jokes cannot strongly 
affect us unless our voluntary nature is alert. We 
must be interested, both in the direction of the disap- 


GOOD AND BAD JOKES 89 

pointment and in that of the satisfaction, in order to 
receive the full flavor of a comic experience. 

If this fact were fully appreciated and made the 
subject of public instruction, it might serve to defend 
us against the infliction not only of dull jokes but also 
of what may be called perfunctory jokes, the product 
of a mere habit of shallow-headed caprice, or “kid- 
ding” — both words are derived from the goat — and it 
might also reduce the torture we suffer from the per- 
petual conversational play-acting, grandiose or pet- 
iose mummery, baby-talk buffoonery, and general 
clowning around of unmagnetic people. It is only 
necessary for a person who is considered wise to act 
foolish in order to give us a kind of jocular surprise, 
for we experience at the same moment a shock and the 
pleasure of a moral relaxation. But very often the 
person who decides to act foolish is mistaken in think- 
ing that this will be a surprise, and out of that fact 
arises much awkward boredom and the artificial laugh- 
ter which may truly be called intellectual. These 
inveterate conversational gay-boys and professional 
pickle-herrings should be advised to make sure that 
the company is fond of them before they carry too far, 
just as jokers must be sure that their matter is interest- 
ing, and not trust the mere form of comicality to pro- 
duce laughter. Humor must be alive — that is the 
first law of the laughter-making art. 

An intuitive effort to conform to this law is the trick 
of imputing one’s jokes to prominent or popular person- 
alities, and especially to great humorists. Mark Twain 


90 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


would appear, since Lincoln passed into history, to be 
the author of most of the comic things that have ever 
been said in the United States. And this is merely 
because the imagination of his genial person and au- 
thority colors a joke and tunes it up to a better explo- 
sion, thickening the mixture a little, as he might have 
said. A trick that is similar in purpose, although 
opposite in fact, is to attribute every humorous thing 
one relates to his own past history, giving it thus the 
warmth of his visible personality and winning a tol- 
erance toward its frailties that might otherwise be 
lacking. This method must be employed with a 
certain courage and preparedness, however, for when 
some one in the audience who is not merciful says, 
“Yes, I heard that story up in Montreal,” there must 
be no weakening. We must reply firmly, “No doubt 
you did,” and add in a slightly wearied manner, “it 
was widely commented on at the time.” 

The importance of this emotional interest in the 
material of humor is revealed in the adjective with 
which we describe our favorite examples. We call 
them rich. And for perfectly scientific purposes a 
rich joke may be defined as a poetic-practical joke in 
which the interest balked and the one satisfied are 
both strong. Jokes about mothers-in-law are not 
often rich, because upon this topic our interests flow 
strongly and continually in only one direction. But 
upon the topic of marriage itself almost all jokes are 
rich, for we are every one of us both for it and against 
it. There are few at least whose hearts in love have 


GOOD AND BAD JOKES 


91 


never inclined toward this authoritative ceremony and 
condition of legal beatitude, deceiving themselves that 
in its consummation they will find that Absolute 
which is the goal of all strong emotion; and few who 
do not hold in their breast the germs of outrageous 
rebellion against its artificial and imposing bonds. 
For this reason matrimony is of all human things the 
most filled full and spouting at the corners with hu- 
morous laughter. It is only necessary to say some- 
thing like this, “Well, there’s one thing about Sam, 
he’s a king in his own household,” and hire some one 
to answer, “Yes, I was there the day she crowned 
him with a pot of beans,” in order to secure a position 
of permanent affluence upon the American vaudeville 
stage. 

In Puritan countries we have a similarly divided 
attitude toward profanity — a mixture of hereditary 
love and acquired disapproval — which makes it pos- 
sible to enliven the dullest tale by dropping in some ap- 
propriate but inappropriate swear-word. And along- 
side of matrimony and swear-words I think we might 
place doctors, as a topic upon which our feelings are 
mixed in this way that is so fertile of hilarity. Healers 
and bringers of balm in our days of pain, in our pros- 
perous days they are always coming in and convicting 
us of unheard-of diseases, and they take a deliberate 
pleasure in removing our appendixes, our tonsils, our 
pituitary bodies, our various ducts, glands, and tissues, 
including our pocketbooks, and other organs which we 
have erroneously considered indispensable. 


92 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


A man subject to epileptic seizures was picked up 
unconscious on the streets of New York and rushed to 
a hospital, and when they took off his coat one of the 
nurses found a piece of paper pinned to the lining, upon 
which was written: “To inform the house surgeon that 
this is just a case of plain fit — not appendicitis. My 
appendix has already been removed twice.” Nothing 
more impetuous than this rush to the doctor — the pic- 
ture of expectancy — nothing more out of that picture 
than to find the mute cause of it warding off any further 
disaster with a diagnosis prepared in advance! And 
when that mute’s contribution is apparently complete, 
and the remark merely thrown in that his appendix has 
been removed, a remark of which we expect little but 
the conclusion, and this impossible word twice hits us, 
disappointing our minds again, but releasing in our 
hearts a whole secondary flood of antidoctorial glee, 
joy, and glory, the cup is indeed running over. That 
is the kind of joke that doubly deserves to be called 
rich, the joke with a reinforced point. And with that 
we may take it as settled that a good joke requires at 
least two strongly flowing currents of interest in the 
person who is expected to laugh. 

Law Number Two 

The feelings aroused in the person who is expected to 
laugh must not he too strong and deep. 

As our first law flowed from the fact that the sense 
of humor is an instinct, this law flows from the fact 


GOOD AND BAD JOKES 


93 


that it is a play instinct. There are certain things 
about which certain people care too firmly and passion- 
ately to contemplate them, or even to perceive them, 
playfully. There are pains and disappointments too 
great, even when they are imaginary, for any interior 
machinery of light-heartedness to turn them into comic 
enjoyment. They run too deep to gear in with that 
machinery. And on the other hand, there are satis- 
factions too solemn and noble in their rhythm of joy 
to reinforce the short ripple of a comic laugh. In 
both directions there must be moderation, in both a 
sense of the bounds of the heart’s possibilities, if we 
are to avoid the peculiar disaster of the inept or un- 
timely joke , the joke that is malapropos . 

How peculiar a disaster it is! How much more 
sickening to the beholder — and to the perpetrator, if 
perchance he is not the shallow barbarian he appears 
— than a misplaced image of poetry, a misplaced pity, 
or pride, or ventilation of anger ! When a joke is not 
a joke, it is too often a tragedy. And this is because 
humor brings with it an implication as to our total 
attitude to life. It does not merely add an emotional 
color, but alters the general tone. The question is not 
only whether we shall feel humorous, but whether we 
shall he playful, at that particular moment — a more 
entailing question. We recognize this in the exquisite 
admiration we give to those who have jested in seasons 
of great personal danger. When Sir Thomas More 
set foot upon the scaffold it shook a little, you remem- 
ber, and he said to the executioner who offered him a 


94 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


hand: “Help me to ascend — I will shift for myself 
coming down.” The unfitness, and yet again the ter- 
rible fitness, of this so common form of words in that 
uncommon circumstance is what makes it humorous; 
but what makes it dearer than any jest is the strong 
audacity of the man’s heart who could say it. Cour- 
age is required to take life playfully, and we are as- 
sured of this when we see one of these men of courage 
take death with the same genius. Rabelais punned 
with his last breath upon the name of the Lord, and 
Heine too had his smile at the business of being al- 
mighty. These celebrated jests are significant, not 
only as examples of the power of humor on the lips of 
those who are in a position to command our feelings, 
but also as warnings to those who are not. We cannot 
jest on any death-bed but our own, and there is a gen- 
eral incompatibility between humor and the deep ex- 
perience of passion, which only those understanding 
it can ever dare to ignore. 

Of the jokes which are bad because they are incon- 
siderate of this simple fact, the commonest and most 
definitely charactered are the hostile joke that is car- 
ried too far, and the sexual joke that we call obscene. 
I suppose the reason why an obscene joke has so blas- 
phemous a flavor to those who enjoy the religion of 
love is that their reverence for love upon the physical 
side was arrived at only after overcoming a childish 
identification of sexual things with things that are 
disgusting. It is a reversion to this attitude that 
they fear when people begin to speak humorously 


GOOD AND BAD JOKES 


95 


about the physical aspects of sex. They fear that 
these people, besides inviting them to be playful about 
a subject charged for them with the most poignant 
emotions — an invitation which they might or might 
not choose to accept — are also inviting them to treat 
this subject as a mere example of the playfully ugly, 
a crude form of poetic humor at its best, and in this 
case contradictory to the essence of their perceptions. 
Their distaste for such humor is poetic and fully justi- 
fied by the Freudian explanation of its character, and 
it is difficult to understand why so many of the apos- 
tles of the Freudian cult should regard a general in- 
sensibility to this distinction as a sign of their libera- 
tion. It is a sign of dulled nerves and a weak sense 
of the qualities of experience. 

Words do not merely name things, but they indicate 
an attitude toward them, and the words which indi- 
cate toward matters of sexual passion an attitude of 
infantile contempt are very sharply distinguished 
from other words, and they will naturally be avoided 
by those whose poetic purpose is not to generate such 
an attitude. A peculiar difficulty arises, however, 
when poets wish to speak sensuously about sex. They 
may desire to speak with all directness, but they are 
compelled to adopt allusions and circumlocutions, be- 
cause no simple poetic names exist for the things they 
would speak of. There is no language of physical love 
between that of anatomical science and that of obscene 
ridicule — an evidence that the race of man has never 
really lived. I can imagine that some day a very great 


96 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


poet, or poetic age of freedom, will fill up those strained 
silences in our vocabulary with names for the lips of 
lovers and of those who sing. It would require a 
poet of no more adventurous determination than Walt 
Whitman, nor more sheer creativeness in language 
than Rabelais. For Walt Whitman at least avowed 
the impulse toward such utterance, and Rabelais did 
fill those silences with pages of the most living names 
ever created by the tuneful imagination of a poet — 
only they were always humorous as well as poetic, and 
so hostile to the full experience of any passion. For 
neither in the way it is to fail, nor in the way it is to 
satisfy, can a thing be humorous and touch us to the 
depths. 

Law Number Three 

Both the negative and the 'positive current of feeling must 
be simply and naturally induced. 

There must be no appearance of effort either in 
building up an interest to be disappointed or in plant- 
ing the seed of satisfaction in that disappointment. 
A joke above all created things must not seem arti- 
ficial. It must not seem manufactured, dragged in, 
far-fetched, or as the Romans used to say it, brought 
from home. It must appear just to have risen up, 
with as light a springing as a wild bird out of the 
natural pathway. In all the forms of art a labored 
thing is usually condemned as bad, but in the art of 
humor it may be condemned as nothing at all. For 


GOOD AND BAD JOKES 


97 


humor is an inseparate property of play, and dies like 
the light in the eyes of a romping child at the first hint 
,<*f an undertaking. 

It was this supreme sin of hard labor that Mark 
Twain committed in that famous speech of his before 
the literary divinities of New England — a speech which 
according to his own account fell into as chilly and 
bottomless a silence as ever greeted the earnest inter- 
ruptions of an idiot. To try to make a humorous 
speech and fail, is the nearest that any man in the full 
possession of his faculties can come to the fine agonies 
of nightmare; and we cannot but shudder in sympathy 
when we think of this young ambitious celebrity com- 
ing out of the West only to ruin himself in that long 
ghastly disaster. But it is also painful to feel obliged 
to try to laugh for the reason that some one with great 
sweat and effort is trying to make you; and that is 
what Mark Twain was doing. His speech, which he 
saw fit to publish and defend many years later, is the 
most evidently labored over, thought out, built up, 
joined together, reared, educated, travelled with, and 
conscientiously perpetrated, of any document in the 
sad history of comic attempts. I can imagine that 
those Bostonian moonshees whose inability to laugh 
he imputes to their dignity and hypersensitiveness, 
were really in almost as much pain as he was, and 
devoutly prayed to their gentle gods that he would 
say something spontaneously playful before he sat 
down. 

Mark Twain was in his intellectual and poetic gifts, 


98 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


and in the native predominance of this instinct, one 
of the great humorists of the world. And the world 
was aware of that. But no book remains that is ex- 
uberant enough to prove it. They are all blemished 
— even his narrative masterpiece, “Huckleberry Finn,” 
is blemished — with long passages of uncontagious hu- 
mor. And I believe the reason is that Mark Twain 
himself regarded his writing, and especially his humor- 
ous writing, as work rather than play. It was money- 
making, and not merry-making, that got possession of 
the soul of this man. He was indolent, but his in- 
dolence was not regal enough to disdain the religion of 
respectability that hung over him. He could never 
heartily have cried with Rabelais: “The fragrant odor 
of the wine, oh, how much more dainty, pleasant, 
laughing, celestial, and delicious it is, than that smell 
of oil ! And I will glory as much when it is said of 
me that I spent more on wine than oil, as Demos- 
thenes did when it was told him that he spent more 
on oil than wine. I truly hold it for an honor and 
praise to be called and reputed a Merry Andrew and 
a Robin Goodfellow. . . . For this cause interpret 
you all my deeds and sayings in the perfectest sense; 
reverence the cheese-like brain that feeds you with 
these fair billevezees and trifling jollities, and do what 
lies in you to keep me always merry. Be frolic now, 
my lads, cheer up your hearts and joyfully read. . . .” 

That is a manifesto to which even the most kempt 
and demeanored of wits may well pay attention. For 
whatever be the pain of its parturition, you must 


GOOD AND BAD JOKES 


99 


never let fall upon the delivery of your joke the shadow 
of the apparition of hard labor. That is an immutable 
law of the laughter-making art. 

Law Number Four 

The identity of the positive current with the negative must 
he immediate and perfect. 

The satisfaction must be, or be of, or be in, the dis- 
appointment. There must be no mediation or bridg- 
ing, no argument necessary here. This is, of course, 
a supreme law for all jokes with a point, flowing directly 
from our definition of the nature of a point — or, for 
that matter, from Euclid’s definition. For a point, 
according to Euclid, is “that which has position with- 
out dimension,” and this is only a more cumbersome 
way of saying that “ brevity is the soul of wit.” The 
soul of wit is more than brief, it is instantaneous. No 
matter how vast and extensive the surroundings nor 
how elaborate the building up of the approach — the 
batteries arranged, the wires laid and connected — all 
that may be accomplished with leisure if the humorist 
has poetic or narrative power, but the current must 
flash when the time comes. If it does not flash, it 
is not there. You cannot explain a joke. You cannot 
nurse, cherish, medicate, exercise, or encourage a joke 
that is lame. The more you sympathize with it, the 
lamer it gets, your efforts and explanations only add- 
ing themselves to what already stood between the two 
elements required to be identical at the first go. Try, 


100 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


for example, to insert into the experience of an Eng- 
lishman, unfamiliar with the sacramental dialects of 
our great American devotions, baseball and Christian 
Science, the humorous flavor of that head-line reporting 
the death of Mary Baker Eddy: “She stole home on 
an error.” You will realize that nothing in this world 
is more remote from the causes of humorous laughter 
than the perfect comprehension of an explained joke . 

A milder infliction, and yet one against which this 
law should also protect us, is the joke which, while 
obvious enough in its intention, is in its actuality 
forced. It is a joke which we have to explain to our- 
selves, bringing its two currents together by some act 
of inference or allowance, instead of finding them per- 
fectly united upon a point. A forced joke whose im- 
perfection is visible to the eye as well as the mind is 
that one in Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing” 
where Messina tries to sing the praise of Benedick, 
while Beatrice runs him down: 

Mess. And a good soldier, too, lady. 

Beat. And a good soldier to a lady : but what is he to lord ? 

A splendid Shakespearian line in its utterance of 
what she means, but in the absence of any identity 
between that and what she does not mean, a very im- 
perfect joke. “Too” is not the same thing as “to a,” 
and only with an expenditure of force can they be com- 
pressed together into a point. 

The same imperfection, although invisible to the 
eye, appears in the response of the clown in “Hamlet” 


GOOD AND BAD JOKES 101 

when he was asked “upon what ground” the prince 
went mad. 

“Why, here in Denmark,” he said. 

In order to be a passable joke, these words would 
have to answer the question “where?” in the same 
instant that they fail to answer the question “why?” 
But this does not happen, because the phrase “upon 
what ground” is not really a natural way of asking 
the question “where?” We have to pretend that it 
is, and that act of pretense divides by a hair’s breadth 
the two things which should be one. 

It may be that this phrase had a different trend of 
meaning in Shakespeare’s time, and, if so, then we have 
illustrated the fact that jokes which we translate, or 
even transport over long ages, have often to be forced 
when they arrive among us. This joke appears to me, 
however, not only forced, but also labored — for those 
words, “Upon what ground,” are not even a simple 
way of asking the question “why?” They were 
falsely imputed to the questioner for the very purpose 
of the clown’s answer. The joke was built up to , in 
short, with artificial dialogue, as Shakespeare’s jokes 
too often are, requiring the antics of a naturally ludi- 
crous actor to get any laughter out of them. And 
since it is a dull and perfunctory joke besides, and not 
worth any labor even if labor were a virtue, I think we 
may set it down as a little model of bad jokes — a thing 
of vices all compact. 

Shakespeare had a true gift of poetic humor; his 
characters, his situations, his epithets, are often in- 


102 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


trinsically laughable. And, moreover, in his painting 
of Falstaff he deliberately flouted the narrow satirical 
conception of humor common to the Aristotelian critics 
of his time. He demanded that we laugh with Fal- 
staff and not only at him. “The brain of this foolish 
compounded clay, man,” says Sir John, “is not able 
to invent anything that tends to laughter, more than 
I invent or is invented on me: I am not only witty in 
myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.” For 
the heroic measure of that boast, as well as for the 
degree of its poetic achievement, we must give some 
honor to the humor of Shakespeare. But in the matter 
of forcing, laboring, far-fetching, explaining, and gener- 
ally miscreating and mismanaging practical jokes, he 
has hardly his equal among the great. Shakespeare is 
the supreme poet, and he was one of the few universal 
intelligences of history, but also, in some measure all 
through his life, he was a man with a peculiar little 
hobby. He was a collector of words, and all sorts of 
odd and minutely surprising word-relations. Perhaps 
in this he merely followed the fashion of his time, but 
often when we expect in Shakespeare a substantial and 
real passion or opinion, we find only the quaint metic- 
ulous enthusiasm of a displayer of these curios. And 
this which is an occasional blemish in his poetry, is the 
continual plague of his jokes. Even when they are 
good jokes, he usually contrives to destroy the current 
of life in them by turning them upside down, advanc- 
ing them face backward, dragging them in, dragging 
them out, picking them apart, or in some other way 


GOOD AND BAD JOKES 


103 


displaying for our inspection what seems to interest 
him far more than humor does — the queer and curious 
beings these words are, out of which it can be made. 

When jokes are very lively in their emotional ma- 
terial, and provoke us to call them rich, they can often 
dispense with some point of formal perfection; and if 
they contain ludicrous imagery, a certain lameness of 
practical formation may even add to their charm. 
But the purely practical and dispassionate jokes which 
we call excellent, or very fine, are always characterized 
by a surprisingly perfect intricate coincidence of some- 
thing which they purport to be and are not, with 
something totally different which they are. A Jewish 
lawyer who studied in the office of Joseph Choate is 
said to have made out a bill to his first client for $500, 
and when Choate quietly picked it up, and added 
another cipher to the amount, the Jew remarked, “Al- 
most thou persuadest me to be a Christian.” If that 
remark runs counter to your emotional prepossessions 
in the matter of jokes between Jews and Christians, 
you will be the more ready to appreciate the quality 
which I am describing as formal perfection. For the 
elaborate exactitude with which those words express a 
wealth of meaning completely alien to the wealth of 
meaning they are wont to express, is what makes them 
memorable. Had it been necessary to vary the quo- 
tation by the breadth of a letter, or having reproduced 
it correctly to ask allowance for the least awkwardness 
or inadequacy of meaning in the new situation, we 
should never have preserved this joke as we have in 


104 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


the humorous lore of the nation. We should have 
called it forced — or seen that it was lame upon the one 
leg or the other. And of this fault, when it is not 
mitigated by some special warmth or delicacy of poetic 
flavor, even the most willing laughers are intolerant. 

Law Number Five 

Practical jokes should not he poetically told, nor poetic 

jokes practically told. 

This simple inference from our definitions would 
save us, oftener than any other rule we could devise, 
from the irritating pity of jokes that are spoiled in the 
telling. It is possible, of course, to spoil a joke in all 
the ways that a joke can be bad — and even in one 
other way, for occasionally some expert bungler will 
leave out the point altogether, giving us a full account 
of the surrounding circumstances with that inexhaust- 
ible beaming smile proper to those who have learned 
their pleasures by heart. Against this accident we 
need no protection, for these jokers by memory create 
more laughter than they destroy. A person who fails 
to see the point is almost always funnier than the 
point. 

But no such compensation occurs when people who 
have enjoyed a story primarily because of the ludicrous 
image it evoked in their imagination, repeat it cor- 
rectly enough in a practical way but without taking the 
trouble to evoke an image in the imagination; nor 
when people who have enjoyed something primarily 


GOOD AND BAD JOKES 


105 


because of the practical or purely narrative setback 
which it contained, dilute that value in the rehearsal 
by spreading an imaginative interest all over the inci- 
dental details. In practical jokes our interest should 
be concentrated upon some forward motion toward a 
goal either of meaning or achievement. In poetic 
humor our interest should be awakened in the qualities 
of a situation. 

A lecture-manager in California once telegraphed to 
Artemus Ward asking him what he would take for 
forty nights on the Pacific Coast. He telegraphed 
back: “ Brandy and water/ 5 That was a manipulation 
of the intellectual process of meaning, and in retelling 
it I had no concern but to put the word “ lecture- 
manager 55 in so prominent a position that the original 
trend of the question would be clear. Other details, 
or any lingering upon this one, would detract from the 
vigor of that trend, and so from the force of its disap- 
pointment. What is wanted is a perfectly naked angle 
of meaning, a blank stoppage in one direction, with 
instantaneous headway in the other. Poetic language 
as such does not give us this angularity of meaning, 
and for that reason poetry is hostile to the clear exist- 
ence of what we call in the narrow sense “a joke.” 
A joke has to be sprung , and while rhyme and a ding- 
dong metre may chime in, true poetry of speech refuses 
to assist in so mechanical a process. 

To his other faults as a joke-maker, Shakespeare 
adds this more forgivable one, that he is never quite 
willing to cease being a poet. He continually tries 


106 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


to spring practical jokes in the language of the imagina- 
tion. He does not seem to perceive the difference be- 
tween that and his true art of luxuriating in the ludi- 
crous — an art which we might well illustrate with 
a chapter from the misadventures of John Falstaff. 
In “The Merry Wives of Windsor” he was trapped in 
his attempted amours by the jealous husband of Mis- 
tress Ford, and concealing himself in a basket of soiled 
clothes, was carried away at her direction and “slighted 
into the river with as little remorse as they would have 
drowned a bitch’s blind puppies, fifteen i’ the litter.” 
Those who remember this tale as Shakespeare tells it, 
will realize that if it were repeated by some one who 
merely knew how to convey a piece of practical infor- 
mation, it too could be spoiled in the telling. 

The distinction between poetic and practical humor, 
like that between poetic and prosaic language, is of 
course a relative one. The two kinds of value are 
commingled in various proportions. But they differ 
fundamentally, and a sense of their difference is indis- 
pensable to those who would make us perfectly happy 
when we laugh. 


Law Number Six 

The disappointment involved in a practical joke should 
be genuine. 

This is of course only our technical way of saying 
that one cannot get the full sting of a joke twice — or 
even once, if the joke is so badly handled that its out- 


GOOD AND BAD JOKES 


107 


come can be anticipated from the beginning. It is a 
rule that should protect us against stale jokes, on the 
one hand, and against obvious jokes, and the terrible 
disaster of giving away the point, on the other. For 
two reasons the rule is not absolute. In the first place 
we can be led to adopt an aesthetic attitude toward a 
good joke, and value it as an object of humorous art 
without actually passing through the process that made 
it humorous. Admiration is a happy pleasure, and 
there are few things that the race of man admires more 
than a clever joke. In the second place, a certain 
amount of histrionics is natural to the mood of play, 
and most of us are able inwardly to simulate an atti- 
tude of genuine expectation, even when we know just 
how it is to be disappointed. We go through the true 
motions, and get some shadow pleasure even at the 
fiftieth rehearsal. But the fact remains that, in practi- 
cal life at least, nothing in the world is quite so stale 
as a stale joke. We beg for the repetition of a familiar 
song, but we consider it an act of mercy to stop a man 
before he tells us one of the stories we have enjoyed 
before. It is because a disappointment was of the 
essence of that enjoyment, and a second disappoint- 
ment in the same premises is impossible. A joke, in 
order to be a joke, has to be a new one. 

And that is what makes family life so trying. It 
was a custom of the previous generation, and will be, 
I suppose, of all previous generations, to lay in a stock 
of “ good stories ” in early youth, and bring them forth 
upon festive occasions, reserving the earlier vintages 


108 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


for the more signal festivities, and the more celebrated 
guests that might be invited into the family circle. It 
was a further custom to bring forth these archaeological 
wonders with a certain pomp and circumstance, call- 
ing the board to attention, or at least waiting for a 
lapse of the conversation in which it might be possi- 
ble to grab its attention, and make formal announce- 
ment that a joke was about to be brought on. Hav- 
ing thus destroyed the atmosphere of spontaneous life 
in which the poor thing might have enjoyed a momen- 
tary resuscitation, and having thoroughly diluted the 
general expectancy by these formal preparations for 
its disappointment, the master of ceremonies would 
proceed, in a hush more appropriate to the offering of 
a word of prayer, to lay out the familiar specifications, 
draw up the plans, prepare, and gradually but with 
resolute purpose and fidelity produce the venerable 
wonder before the eyes of all. A great burst of exag- 
gerated laughter would follow, and every one privately 
seek about among the wreckage of the previous conver- 
sation for some good line upon which to get away from 
the scene of the disaster. But no! The ceremony 
was not finished. Before this all too perfect burst of 
hilarity should subside, there was to be at least one, if 
not indeed two or three, or perhaps four, repetitions 
of the very quintessential point of the thing, so that 
no mind could escape it, or fail to acknowledge its 
wonderful spice and durability. 

That was a model of the proper way not to appeal 
to the sense of humor. A person who comprehends 


GOOD AND BAD JOKES 


109 


the natural action of this sense will not only never 
repeat a stale joke if he can help it, nor permit the 
point of a joke to appear before it has arrived, nor 
attempt to dwell upon it, or drag it out, after it has 
arrived, but he will even prefer — if his joke is good 
enough to dispense with the aid of hypnotic sugges- 
tion — to keep his auditors unaware up to the very 
point of explosion that he has any designs whatever 
upon their centres of risibility. For thus their disap- 
pointment will be most pure and genuine, and their 
satisfaction brightened with a real surprise. 

We find accordingly that the more sensitive lovers of 
humor are loath to sit in at those long sessions of “ story- 
swapping” that corrupt the atmosphere of our club- 
rooms, and spring up sometimes around our very 
hearths. There is truth in the dictum of Thomas De 
Quincey that “Of all the bores whom man in his 
folly hesitates to hang, and heaven in its mysterious 
wisdom suffers to propagate their species, the most 
insufferable is the teller of ‘good stories’ — a nuisance 
that should be put down by cudgelling, by submersion 
in horse-ponds, or any mode of abatement, as sum- 
marily as men would combine to suffocate a vampire 
or a mad-dog.” It is not only the peculiar vapidness 
of an expected disappointment that justifies this noble 
incitement to riot, but also, I think, the peculiar rigid- 
ness which comes over a joke so soon as it is regarded 
as a thing, a commodity, an object of general ex- 
change. For it then gets over into the category of 
economic goods, is tainted with a suspicion of “labor 


110 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


value/’ and so loses, as we have seen, that playful 
liquidity which was its bath of origin, and is the only 
element in which it can vigorously revive and receive 
breath. 

Is there in all the annals of commerce a more pathetic 
and humorless figure than the man who having made 
a joke and typewritten it upon a slip of paper, is spend- 
ing his morning peddling it from one comic editor to 
another, in hope to secure the price of his breakfast? 
Is there a more lifeless corpse in creation — a fish more 
distant from water — than that joke as he pulls it with 
this serious engagement of interest from his inside 
pocket? And is there, finally, a person less in a po- 
sition to enjoy the joke, supposing it should come to 
life upon his knees, than that industriously “ comic” 
editor? I think the reader will agree that commerce 
is only a shade less poisonous than manufacture to 
the play atmosphere in which all jokes take life and 
motion. And if he will reflect that barter is but a 
primitive and infant kind of commerce, he will begin 
to see the form in which an indignation against the 
business of swapping stones presents itself to the mind 
of the true humorist. It is, in brief, a business — 
or very soon becomes one, a kind of inverse competi- 
tion setting in, and each bright wit trying to give more 
for his money than the preceding, until thus gradually 
creating a state of emulative enterprise, in which none 
of them is able to give anything of the fresh, idle, and 
inconsequential bloom of true humor. Humor is a 
wild thing, quick on its wings. It comes at its best in 


GOOD AND BAD JOKES 


111 


the midst of other preoccupations, breaking them and 
yet belonging among them like the foaming ripple in a 
clear stream, subsiding again to be again awakened 
after its flash is forgotten. 

Having established these six absolute precepts, as 
it were from the exterior, we may now pass into the 
interior of a joke, and lay down two laws as to the 
proper relation of its parts. The first of these laws is 
directed against those jokes in which the interest dis- 
appointed, while not very passionate, has acquired a 
fair momentum from the elaborateness of its prepara- 
tion, or the time through which it has been sustained, 
and the substituted satisfaction when it comes, seems 
relatively slight and inconspicuous. The point does 
not stand up, and the joke is properly described as 
flat. To avoid flat jokes our law of symmetry may be 
expressed as follows: 

Law Number Seven 

The interest satisfied must not he too weak in proportion 
to the interest disappointed. 

In order to apply this law with liberality, it is neces- 
sary to remind ourselves that a mere disappointment, 
if properly managed, can be humorous — just as nega- 
tive electricity, they say, can exist alone — and the 
droll moment thus arising is not properly to be de- 
scribed as a '‘joke,” nor to be tried or condemned 
under these laws of symmetry. Every once in a while 


112 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


a comedian devises a new form of complicated prepara- 
tion to do something, and succeeds in convulsing his 
audience, and retiring after half an hour amid shouts 
of applause, without having done anything at all. 
That is almost a pure absurdity, and its virtue — aside 
from those indefinable poetic values of personality 
and situation — lies in the sincerity and elaborateness 
of the preparations. The art is to convey a playful 
humor by seeming hopelessly at work. And the same 
thing is true about absurdities in speech, the merit 
of an Irish bull consisting entirely in the nice perfec- 
tion of its plausibility. 

Charles Lamb was very much puzzled by the charm 
of a certain whimsical no-joke, which he describes in 
his Essay on the Popular Fallacy that The Worst Puns 
are the Best. “An Oxford scholar,” he says, “meeting 
a porter who was carrying a hare through the streets, 
accosts him with this extraordinary question: "Prithee, 
sir, is that thy own hare, or a wig?’” 

Observing the total inability of his mind to find 
rest in this ""most utter and inextricable” absurdity, 
Charles Lamb sought out points of rest for his imagi- 
nation. He tried to explain its humor by alluding to 
the place where it occurred, "" a public street not favora- 
ble to frivolous investigations,” the character of the 
participants, and other subordinate if contributory 
details. In short he deceived himself that it was a 
poetic joke, because as a practical joke he was at a 
loss to understand what satisfaction it held. The 
failure of satisfaction itself was the focus of his enjoy- 


GOOD AND BAD JOKES 


113 


men t — and not only the failure of serious satisfaction, 
but the failure of that failure to produce a jocular 
satisfaction, while holding out so plausible a pretense 
to do so. The reason why “the worst puns are the 
best” — an aphorism which I believe John Dryden 
originated- — is that they play a joke upon jocularity. 
And when jocularity is as poor as it is in the whole 
business of pun-making, we are more than willing to 
have this joke played. 

When I say we are “more than willing,” I do of 
course concede to these puns a positive value as well 
as a negative. Besides failing to he good , they succeed 
in being completely had , and that brings some balm 
to the victim. The balm is so slight, however, and 
the trouble so large, that I think we might take these 
puns which we are supposed to admire for their crimi- 
nality as fair examples of the whole genus of flat 
jokes — typical in their structure, and in their flavor 
characteristic. They do not hand forth a sincere, 
spontaneous, and unavoidable nothing for us to smile 
at with the original smile of humor; they put up a 
grinning and egregious pretense to give us also some- 
thing else , and that something else turns out a mere 
trite act of petty cognizance. They have a point, 
but its positive action is extremely weak. 

To further illustrate this weakness — and to avoid 
damaging any reputation that is less secure — I take a 
second example of a flat joke from Aristophanes. He 
is still describing an argument in Hades as to which is 
the greater poet, iEschylus or Euripides. Dionysus, 


114 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


who is the judge, sets up a pair of scales, and orders 
the two poets to take hold, one upon each side, and 
recite a line of poetry. Euripides recites the first line 
of his Medea: 

“Would god no Argo e’er had winged the brine!” 

/Escliylus quotes his Philoctetes: 

“Spercheios, and ye haunts of grazing kine!” 

The scales descend in favor of HSschylus, and Eu- 
ripides asks the reason why. Dionysus replies: “He 
slipped in a river, like a wool-dealer wetting a fleece to 
make it heavy. You put in a verse with wings.” 

Before condemning this joke we ought to remind 
ourselves that judging poetry and weighing wool were 
both matters of vital interest in Athens. The subject- 
matter was alive, and we must make some effort of 
historic imagination even to hear the story as it sounded 
then. But that effort being made, we become inter- 
ested. We want a decision on the literary merits of 
these poets. We have been wanting it in fact through 
several scenes, and here an extensive apparatus has 
been collected, and our expectation, while not exactly 
“strained,” may at least be described as well banked 
and glowing. 

We are disappointed. We get no decision on the 
merits of the poets or their lines of poetry. And what 
do we get? A reminder that a river weighs more 
than w T ings, that wool-dealers cheat their customers, 
a dig at iEschylus on the basis of that labored simile, 


GOOD AND BAD JOKES 


115 


a dig at the business of weighing literature when that 
business was only rigged up for the very purpose of 
this joke — a mere job lot of triviality, in short, and 
that after a long wait and a real disappointment. I 
think we can say with more confidence than usual in 
matters of translated humor, that this joke did not 
have enough strength in the joy end to “get across” — 
or that if it did, then in the language of Frank Tinney 
it “just laid there.” 

Aristophanes himself seems to have been a little 
nervous about it, for he tried it over again twice with 
a slight variation, and then fell back hastily upon a 
gibe at the marital difficulties of Euripides — a “sure 
fire” in any age or language. /Esehylus tells Euripides 
to get into the scales himself, with all his books, and 
his wife and children, or as we should say, the whole 
damn family — including Cephisophon. Well, Cephis- 
ophon was not a member of Euripides’s family, except 
as the furtive lover of his wife. And so here the audi- 
ence received not only a ludicrous suggestion, exag- 
gerating this already fantastic performance to the 
point of explosion, but also, in the midst of that sug- 
gestion a startling irrelevancy that was delightfully 
relevant. 

The studious reader will see that the centre of 
gravity — or to be more accurate, the centre of levity — 
in this joke was well over the base, and there was no 
possible danger of its falling flat. And this condition 
of stable equilibrium was attained, he will observe, 
by adding weight to the positive side. It was upon 


116 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


that side at least that we felt the weakness of what 
preceded. Our second law of symmetry deals with 
those jokes in which there is a similar lack of equilib- 
rium, but instead of feeling the weakness of the posi- 
tive, we feel the excessive strength of the negative. 
We feel deeply disturbed, and but lightly compensated 
for the disturbance. 

Law Number Eight 

The interest disappointed must not he too strong in pro- 
portion to the interest satisfied . 

To a mechanic it wdll appear that this law differs 
from Number Seven only in emphasis; and that is 
true. But to an artist, who understands that we are 
concerned with feelings and not with material weights 
and measures, it will be evident that this law is not 
only very different, but far more serious than Num- 
ber Seven. Indeed I venture to predict that when all 
these Eight Commandments are properly engraved 
upon tablets of stone and set up in the market-place 
of some future commonwealth — the relative triviality 
of our criminal and civil codes being by that time 
generally understood — it will be this eighth section 
under which the greatest number of convictions will 
be secured, and the most summary executions will 
follow. For its purpose is to protect the free citizen 
against sudden aggression and violation in any mortal 
part of the poetry of his life at the hands of the flip- 
pant joker. And a flippant joker may be defined, in 


GOOD AND BAD JOKES 


117 


accordance with its provisions, as one who disrupts 
any strong trend of action or thought or feeling, with- 
out offering in its place a profound, wise, beautiful, or 
exciting comment, or idea, or vision of life, or even a 
sincere and contagious contempt of life. He is a light 
nut whose thoughts have no momentum. His feel- 
ings have no depth. He thinks he can skate like a 
water-bug with the same silly whims over shallow and 
deep. And when this habit is thoroughly settled 
upon him, and we observe that everything which comes 
under his ken is given a turn supposed to interrupt 
our contemplation of it with some microscopic pleasure, 
usually the pleasure of admiring his wits, we call such 
a person facetious. Those to whom the death penalty 
may seem a little extreme even for these chronic offend- 
ers — those who never despair of reforming their kind — 
will find a sentence pronounced against one of them 
by William Shakespeare, which has a remedial appro- 
priateness not common in courts of less poetic justice. 
He tells him to “Go and jest a twelve-month in a 
hospital.” There, if anywhere, he will learn the sim- 
ple truth upon which the law he violates was founded. 
There are moods and passages in this battle of heart- 
beats in which, although humor may be possible, it is 
not easy, and for the playful reception of a gratuitous 
pain we demand with all right and justice a substan- 
tial and a quick reward. 

It is not only because we are practical, and wish to 
be serious in the pursuit of our happy ends, that we 
make this demand, but also because we are poetic and 


118 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


desire the privilege of tasting our sorrows. We should 
not always choose to perceive humorously, even if we 
could, those pains and sweet losses that belong to us. 
We have so strong an impulse to experience life that 
we enjoy suffering. And since the suffering that is 
caused to us by our own afflictions is too cleaving and 
shocking to our equilibrium to be always welcome, 
we turn often to that milder pain which comes to us 
by sympathy when we behold the misfortunes and the 
sad expressions of others. We let them bear the or- 
ganic shock, and also the practical consequences, 
while we drink off the pure flavor of sorrow. And this 
experience — still more enjoyable when we know that 
those others are not now alive, or that the misfortunes 
which give rise to their expressions are only simulated 
— this experience we call pathos. Pathos is a name 
for any arrangement of things, deliberate or acci- 
dental, which permits the tender and sympathetic en- 
joyment of sorrow. And because the occasions which 
permit this enjoyment, the slight remoteness or modera- 
tion of the misfortunes involved, are similar to the occa- 
sions which produce humorous pleasure, it is the most 
difficult of all values to defend against “fresh” or flip- 
pant jokers. Pathos is impossible to the flippant; in 
their very presence its color blanches like the petals 
of a flower in chlorine gas. Both for the purposes of 
joy and sorrow, therefore, we resist them. 

But the proximity of humor and pathos, although 
laying us open to these insipid depredations of the 
Smart Aleck, offers to the humorist whose jokes are 


GOOD AND BAD JOKES 


119 


rich and human in their positive values a unique and 
poignant avenue of art. For his humor is not so far 
out of key with pathos as to be destroyed by their mod- 
ulation the one into the other. It is a modulation be- 
tween serious and playful pain — a thing which seems 
to enhance, almost as though with a tremor of peril, 
our enjoyment of them both. I do not know any 
book in which this experience was ever made more 
beautiful than it is in “ Sentimental Tommy.” Tommy 
ran away, you remember, on that night after the birth 
of Elspeth — an accident which he had tried so hard 
but ignominiously failed to prevent. He fell asleep on 
a distant stair, and woke up in the very early hours of 
morning, clammy and cold and quaking — “and he was 
a very little boy, so he ran to his mother. 

“Such a shabby dark room it was, but it was home, 
such a weary worn woman in the bed, but he was her 
son, and she had been wringing her hands because he 
was so long in coming, and do you think he hurt her 
when he pressed his head on her poor breast, and do 
you think she grudged the heat his cold hands drew 
from her warm face? He squeezed her with a violence 
that put more heat into her blood than he took out 
of it. 

“And he was very considerate, too: not a word of 
reproach in him, though he knew very well what that 
bundle in the back of the bed was.” 

Our hearts are quickened by this swift and gentle 
change, and their smiling laughter shines out both 
humbled a little and refreshed, like the blossoms in a 


120 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


meadow after the passage of a shower. And they are 
quickened in the same way when the shower does not 
pass at all, but the sun just comes and shines inconti- 
nently right in the middle of it. It was so when 
Tommy after a period of selfish hesitation decided to 
spend the whole of a God-given shilling to buy his 
destitute and hungry mother a useful present. “He 
devoted much thought to what she was most in need 
of, and at last he bought her a colored picture of Lord 
Byron swimming the Hellespont.” 

That was one of those trembling moments — frequent 
enough in our own lives too — of which we say, “ I did 
not know whether to laugh or cry!” They reveal to 
us better than any discourse can what humor is, and 
why it is. And they give also a kind of poem-portrait 
of its nature. For there is a tincture of pathos, as 
well as of comedy, in the very existence of this in- 
stinct — as a glance in the eyes of any great humorist 
can tell you. Humor is a most adroit and exquisite 
device by which our nerves outwit the stings and 
paltry bitterness of life, but it is after all only a device. 
It cannot be substituted for life. Like Pagliacci we 
can only up to a certain point recite our lines in play. 
The serious purposes of nature throb up into our heads, 
and we find ourselves living the tragedy to its depth. 
It is not play. Or if perhaps it is, then the game is 
too rough for this frail-hearted child of his mother, 
man, who has strayed into it. His sense of humor is 
more rich than consolation, but it is not victory. 


PART II 


THEORIES OF HUMOR 



CHAPTER I 

THE GREEK PHILOSOPHERS 

That there are two general kinds of laughter, and 
that a complete comic experience contains a union of 
the two, can almost be inferred from the variety of the 
attempts men have made to explain laughter and give 
a single account of its cause. Their explanations 
divide themselves into three classes — those which seek 
the cause of laughter in some kind of disappointment, 
those which seek it in some kind of satisfaction, and 
those which seek it in a mixture of satisfaction with 
disappointment. 

In the very beginning it was a conversation about 
pleasures that are mixed with pain which gave rise to 
the attempt to make a science of comic entertainment. 

“You remember,” says Plato in the “Philebus,” 
“how at the sight of tragedies the spectators smile 
through their tears?” 

“Certainly, I do.” 

“And are you aware that even at a comedy the 
soul experiences a mixed feeling of pain and pleasure?” 

The science of humor was born in this peculiar in- 
tuition of Plato’s. But, though so well born, it did not 
grow very well in his hands, for Plato quite failed to 
comprehend the nature of this “mixture” which he 

123 


124 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


had divined. He said that the pleasure which we 
experience in laughing at the comic is an enjoyment 
of other people’s misfortunes; the pain is our envy of 
those people, which makes that enjoyment possible. 
He would have been in a stronger position if he had 
said that the pain is our pity of those people, for then 
he would have made plausible a real mixture of pleasure 
with pain, instead of merely asserting that the pleasure 
is one which relieves us of a pain. It is not necessary 
to envy people in order to enjoy their misfortunes — it 
is only necessary to be there. And Plato may have 
become aware of this, for he did not develop the idea 
that the comic is a mixture of pleasure with pain, but 
wandered away from it, and seemed content in the 
end to define the comic simply as a pleasure — the 
pleasure of seeing other people humiliated, of seeing 
them appear stupid when they are not powerful or 
important enough so that their stupidity is a danger 
to us. 

Aristotle borrowed this idea, just as he and the rest 
of the world have always borrowed ideas, from Plato, 
and in the fifth chapter of his “ Poetics” he defined 
the occasion of comic laughter as an ugliness that is 
not harmful. 

“Comedy,” he said, “is an imitation of characters of a lower 
type— -not, however, in the full sense of the word bad, the ludi- 
crous being merely a subdivision of the ugly. It consists in 
some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive. To 
take an obvious example, the comic mask is ugly and distorted, 
but does not imply pain.” 


THE GREEK PHILOSOPHERS 


125 


Thus it appears that both Plato and Aristotle iden- 
tified the laughter of the Greek theatre with scorn. 
Or, to be more scientific, they conceived laughter as 
the expression of an emotion compounded of com- 
placence, or “ positive self-feeling/’ with a very slight 
tincture of disgust or anger. And upon the basis of 
this conception they were inclined to condemn laughter, 
and advise the philosophers and wise men of the state 
not to indulge in it. “ Persons of worth,” says Plato 
in the third book of the “ Republic,” “even if only 
mortal, must not be represented as overcome by laugh- 
ter, and still less must such a representation of the gods 
be allowed.” In the “Theatetus,” however, where 
Plato gives his most genial description of the character 
of the philosopher, he says that under certain circum- 
stances he “ cannot help laughing sincerely in the sim- 
plicity of his heart.” And it is worth remarking that 
Plato himself indulged in such laughter very often, 
and that a gentle and all-comprehending profound 
smile is almost the essence of his philosophy. Indeed, 
such a master as he of the warmer and more lovable 
colors of humor could never have grown up among 
the Athenian Greeks if their laughter had been all 
egotism and envy. 

There was, to be sure, a great license of attack and 
ridicule on those holidays which the city of Athens 
devoted to laughter. Aristotle tells us it was the 
“lampooners” who became writers of comedy when 
dramatic action began to take the place of the recita- 
tion of poems. And lampooners were men of free 


126 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


tongue in that youthful day. But he also tells us that 
comedy arose among the makers of phallic verses, 
and we know that the word comic itself in its origin 
does not mean lampoonery, or satire, or ridicule, or any- 
thing else either so scornful or so intellectual as that. 
It means village revelry or merrymaking, and has relics 
in its aroma of wine-drinking in the evening, and of 
ribald song and organized conviviality after the day’s 
work is done. It is more Pantagruellian than sardonic, 
having about as much scorn in its comprisal as one of 
those fervent salutations of Rabelais to his disciples — 
“Most noble and illustrious drinkers, and you thrice 
precious pockified blades!” 

Any one who tries to enter into the humor of Aris- 
tophanes will realize how much of this mood still pre- 
vailed in his time. His plays are good-natured great 
farcical exploits of imaginative tomfoolery, which 
cannot even be enjoyed in the reading, unless one has 
got into his mind in advance a very copious extra 
supply of pure mirth. And while pugnacity and pride 
play a great part in creating the positive values of 
these exploits, so also do sexuality and sociability, 
and the love of truth and poetry, and all the other 
loves of an abounding life. “ He is always in the com- 
pany of Dionysus and Aphrodite,” as Plato himself 
said of him. His characters were Falstaffian rather 
than Quixotic — they enjoyed the jokes, and frequently 
went laughing about their own fantastic business. 
Indeed the very license of their biting gives evidence 
that the fundamental mood of their creation was not 


THE GREEK PHILOSOPHERS 


127 


hostile but hilarious. The Athenians did not throng 
out upon that sunny hillside to enjoy the misfortunes 
of others, but to enjoy laughter. And they were as 
ready to laugh when the comedian turned his ridicule 
upon them as when he made himself ridiculous for 
their pleasure. It is still remembered how Socrates 
got up in his seat to make more comic the caricature 
of him which Aristophanes was presenting upon the 
stage, and I believe that incident is typical of the exu- 
berant humor of those best days of the world. 

There must have been some opposition even in 
Plato’s mind, to the idea that comic laughter is always 
derisive. For in the “Symposium” he represents 
Aristophanes as making a distinction between the 
word 7eXoto?, which is elsewhere Plato’s name for the 
ridiculous, and /carayeXacrTos , or as we might say, 
the laughable and the laugh-downable. And at the 
end of the “Symposium,” when everybody else is 
drunk or asleep or gone home, and the cocks are be- 
ginning to crow, Socrates is still sitting there discours- 
ing, and he is insisting to Aristophanes and Agathon 
that “the genius of comedy is the same as that of 
tragedy,” to which statement they are compelled to 
assent because they are “ sleepy and do not quite un- 
derstand his meaning.” At so great a distance we 
can hardly pretend to understand his meaning, either, 
but we can believe it involved the idea that imagina- 
tive sympathy as well as corrective hostility plays its 
part in the process of comic enjoyment. 

In view of these facts, it is not surprising that Aris- 


128 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


totle’s writings, besides containing the derision theory 
of Plato, should contain also the other great historic 
theory — that laughter is caused by a disappointment 
of the person who laughs. In his “Rhetoric,” which 
is a more practical book than the “Poetics,” a book 
devoted to showing people how to talk effectively in 
the law-courts, Aristotle speaks entirely in the lan- 
guage of this theory. He does what every one else has 
done who has ever attempted to tell any one how to 
make people laugh — he identifies a joke with a deceived 
expectation. In illustration he quotes a line of poetry 
which would be funny in English, too, if we wore san- 
dals and placed our words in the same order that the 
Greeks do. 

“He proceeded, wearing under his feet — chilblains !” 

Aristotle might have observed how in this very 
example he was uniting a disappointment of the read- 
er’s temporary expectation with a satisfaction of his 
chronic hunger for the misfortunes of others. And so 
he might have combined Plato’s definition of the comic 
with his own definition of a joke, and evolved a theory 
of humor that would have saved his successors a great 
deal of trouble. He would have given a real mean- 
ing to Plato’s assertion that comic experience is a 
kind of “mixture.” And that “the misfortune of 
others” is not an indispensable part of this mixture 
would soon have been evident to him — for he did 
actually describe a joke in which the affirmative value 
is not misfortune, but a simple recognition of the truth. 


THE GREEK PHILOSOPHERS 


129 


It was a pun made by Isocrates upon the word &PXV, 
which means both sovereignty and beginning . Isocrates 
said that the sovereignty of the Athenians (over the 
sea and the surrounding peoples) was the beginning of 
their troubles. And Aristotle observed that we en- 
joy this joke because “that is stated which we did not 
expect, and we acknowledge it to be true.” 

Thus the Greek philosophers were groping toward a 
real understanding of the complexities of the comic. 
But they did not labor long enough, and the problem 
was left at loose ends by them, as it has been by the 
moderns. There was a satisfaction theory, a disap- 
pointment theory, and a vague apprehension of the 
twofold character of jokes. 


CHAPTER II 

THE AGNOSTIC ATTITUDE 

Cicero was a brilliant mocker, and he said in his 
dialogue “De Oratore” that it is a part of the orator’s 
business to raise a laugh, because it “ lessens, confounds, 
hampers, frightens, and confutes the opponent.” He 
defined the province of the ridiculous, in accordance 
with Aristotle’s theory, as “a certain meanness and 
deformity,” and he enjoyed most easily, it seems, the 
jokes that are jokes on somebody. I can imagine the 
sly and urbane masculine relish with which he used to 
repeat that response of a certain Sicilian to some one 
who was lamenting because his wife had hanged her- 
self upon a fig-tree. “My dear,” he said, “I wish you 
would give me some slips of that same tree that I may 
graft them in my garden !” 

But Cicero was also a genial friend, and he knew 
quite well that there are other kinds of humorous 
laughter than this. He quoted beside it the little re- 
mark of Marcus Lepidus, who stretched himself out 
on the grass with a sigh and said, “I wish this was 
working !” — a remark which while dismaying our sense 
of rationality and the potential in the way of wishes, 
yet gives an extreme pleasure of expression to our own 
indolence, and makes us admire Lepidus with a pious 
and companionable love. Thus it was natural that 

130 


THE AGNOSTIC ATTITUDE 


131 


Cicero should revive also the other opinion of the 
Greeks, and say that “the most eminent kind of the 
ridiculous is that in which we expect to hear one thing 
and another is said.” 

Cicero was not content, however, to leave these two 
ideas unrelated to each other, as Aristotle had; he did 
propose a plan by which they might be reconciled. We 
always laugh at some one, he said, but in the cases 
where laughter arises from a deceived expectation, 
“our mistake makes us laugh at ourselves.” That is 
the way in which genial humor is still usually explained 
by those who insist that all laughter is but a modified 
contempt; it makes out of the derision theory some- 
thing that at least pretends to be a complete expla- 
nation. 

Aside from originating that commodious idea, Cicero 
added nothing to Aristotle’s solution of the problem of 
the comic, except the valuable opinion that Aristotle 
did not solve it. 

“ What a laugh is,” he said, “by what means it is raised, 
wherein it consists, in what manner it bursts out, and is so sud- 
denly discharged, that though we were willing, it is out of our 
power to stifle it, and in what manner it all at once takes pos- 
session of our sides, of our mouth, our veins, our look, our eyes, 
let Democritus explain all these particulars; they are not to my 
present purpose, and if they were I should not at all be ashamed 
to say that I do not know them; for even they who pretend to 
account for them know nothing of the matter.” 

Quintilian followed Cicero in this as in most of his 
opinions. His book on the “Institutes of the Orator” 


132 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


tells us that “scorn is close kin to laughter,” and also 
that “deceiving the expectation” is a method of mak- 
ing people laugh. But its principal conclusion is that 
“none yet have satisfactorily expressed what laughter 
is, though many have tried it.” 

Evidently the problem was a good deal gently ban- 
died about among the Romans as among the Greeks, 
and not very respectfully considered. And the pro- 
posal to make a virtue of giving it up did not die 
with them, either, but has held its place among the 
leading theories of humor. Galen adopted it. David 
Hume said that wit “cannot be defined but is dis- 
cerned only by taste and sensation.” Jean Paul de- 
clared that the ludicrous would “never go into the 
definitions of the philosophers except under compul- 
sion.” In our own day James Sully — whose long “ Es- 
say on Laughter” travels in a weary-thorough fashion 
all over this subject — seems to avoid any more final 
opinion than that laughter is a good thing and ought 
to be preserved if possible. Edward L. Thorndyke, in 
his “Educational Psychology,” observes that the pro- 
vocatives of laughter have not yet been included in 
any simple generalization, although he expresses the 
hope that they may be. The same hope was expressed 
by G. Stanley Hall, who sent out a questionnaire on 
“Tickling, Laughing and the Comic,” and received in 
return three or four thousand items of information, 
which proved little but the enormous variety of the 
occasions of laughter, and persuaded him that “all 
current theories are utterly inadequate and specula- 


THE AGNOSTIC ATTITUDE 


133 


tive.” That they not only are, but always will be, 
inadequate, seems to be the opinion of the French 
psychologist Ribot, and of his pupil L. Dugas. In 
his “ Psychologie du Rire ” Dugas says that the occa- 
sions of laughter are too varied for any generalization 
to include, or any “psychological unity” ever to be 
found among them. A similar conclusion seems to 
have been reached a 'priori by the Italian philosopher 
Benedetto Croce. In an article called “ L’Umorismo” 
in the Journal of Comparative Literature he says that 
those who rightly understand the functions of descrip- 
tive psychology and literary criticism will “conclude 
by renouncing the vain pretense of finding the true 
(that is, rigorous and philosophic) definition of humor; 
and from the fact that no two psychologists are in 
accord upon its definition, will draw the inference for 
once correct; that humor is a word which applies to a 
group of representations that can never be separated 
out from their relations with a clear precision, except 
arbitrarily and for convenience.” 1 

This sceptical tendency has its climax in an essay 
by L. Cazamian, to be found in the Revue Germanique, 
entitled “Why We Cannot Define Humor.” In that 
essay, as also in Croce’s, humor is not taken as we take 

1 Croce seems in this essay to leave open the possibility that 
“empirical psychology” may reach a definition of humor, al- 
though it will be of no value to the literary critic; and in his 
book on aesthetics he accepts, at least until a better one is 
offered, the mechanical theory of comic pleasure advanced by 
Theodor Lipps. It is hard to say just to what length he would 
extend his scepticism about the definition of “humor.” 


134 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


it, to designate the comic experience in general. The 
author thinks that Bergson’s derision theory is a true 
account of the comic, but he is not satisfied with its 
application to those more subtle and complex trans- 
positions of our ideas and sentiments which we describe 
as humor in the narrow sense. He really succeeds, 
therefore, in making apparent the inadequacy of Berg- 
son’s theory of laughter, and warrants our taking his 
own conclusion in a more sweeping sense than he may 
have intended. 

“ Humor escapes science,” he says, “ because its characteristic 
and constant elements are few in number and generally negative, 
while its variable elements are in number indeterminate, be- 
cause its matter, as we have said, infinitely exceeds its form.” 

The ideal definition is to point to a thing. But it 
seems strange that this ideal should be so uniquely in- 
voked in the matter of comic experience. There is no 
other subject, as we reflect upon it, besides God and 
laughter, toward which the scientific mind has ever 
advocated so explicit and particular a humility. And 
since we are, in the manner of all estimable historians, 
merely using this history for the greater glory of our 
own opinion, we may now proceed to explain just why 
it is that so many energetic minds have wanted to 
give up the attempt to generalize about laughter. It 
is because they have not been willing to generalize 
enough. Seeing that laughter is a peculiar thing, they 
have deemed it also an unusual thing. They have 
tried to explain it as an accompaniment of some spe- 


THE AGNOSTIC ATTITUDE 


135 


cific conditions of fact or feeling, whereas it is an ac- 
companiment of very general conditions — that of satis- 
faction, and that of dissatisfaction when the instincts 
are in a state of play. The thing to be explained by 
alluding to specific conditions is that sometimes an 
animal as social and as playful as mankind, even when 
he is alert and happy, is not found to be smiling ! 


CHAPTER III 
THE DERISION THEORY 

In the picture of history which learned instruction 
has built up in my imagination, a complete darkness 
prevails from a little after the time of Cicero until the 
time of Montaigne — the sun did not shine and nobody 
smiled in Europe from the second century to the fif- 
teenth. I believe the fact is, however, that there was 
more light-hearted comedy abroad then than ever 
since. The church took care of our sorrows; our joy 
was our own. And so it is no surprise if one or two of 
the writers of that time did generalize enough, and gave 
a more simple and natural account of the occasions of 
laughter than any of the great philosophers who came 
after them. Saint Gregory of Nyssa, one of the most 
prayerful and holy and theological of fathers, was, I 
believe, the first psychologist to perceive that it does 
not require humor to make people laugh, but they 
are ready to laugh at anything or anybody who drops 
in on them with a flavor like good news. 

“ If one is gladdened,” he said, “ by a pleasant communication 
the ducts of the body will also be enlarged owing to the pleasure. 
Now in the case of pain the fine and invisible evaporations of 
the ducts are checked, and as the viscera within is bound in 
tighter position, the moist vapor is forced to the head and to 
the membrane of the brain. This vapor being accumulated in 

136 


THE DERISION THEORY 


137 


the hollows of the brain is then pressed out through the ducts 
lying beneath to the eyes, where the contraction of the eyelashes 
segregates the moisture in the form of drops called tears. Like- 
wise, on the other hand, it must be observed that if the ducts 
are enlarged beyond their accustomed size in consequence of 
the opposite affections, a quantity of air is drawn through them 
toward the depths, and is there again naturally expelled through 
the mouth, since the entire viscera, and especially it is said the 
liver, forcefully ejects this air by a convulsive and violent move- 
ment. Nature therefore provides for the passage of this air 
through an enlargement of the aperture of the mouth by means of 
the pushing apart of the cheeks enclosing the air. This condi- 
tion is termed laughter.” 

This was in the fourth century. And after a space 
of one thousand years, in which many similar things 
may have got lost, or at least were buried too deep for 
me to find them, the same natural association of 
laughter with gladness appears in Castiglione’s famous 
book “The Courtier”: 

“To describe a man the commune saiying is, He is a livinge 
creature that can laugh: because this laughing is perceived 
onlie in man, and (in maner) alwaies is a token of a certein 
jocundenesse and meerie moode that he feeleth inwardlie in his 
minde, which by nature is drawen to pleasantnesse and coveteth 
quietnes and refreshing, for whiche cause we see menne have in- 
vented many matters, as sportes, games and pastimes, and so 
many sundrie sortes of open showes.” 

That is the simple truth with which Castiglione 
begins his discussion of jests in the second book of 
“The Courtier.” But soon after that naive beginning 
he falls to plagiarizing from Cicero, and he then only 


138 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


rehearses the two traditional opinions: first, that the 
object of laughter is a certain moderate meanness, 
and that jokes are “privie tauntes” or “nickes,” which 
are not “of any grace without that litle bitynge”; and 
second, that “even as in Jestynge to speake contrary 
to expectacyon moveth laughter, so doeth in Meerie 
Pranckes to doe contrarie to expectacyon. ... In 
both kindes the chief matter is to deceive opinion, 
and to answer otherwise then the hearer loketh for.” 
Throughout his discourse, however, and his listing of 
jests, Castiglione retains a more genial and a deeper 
sense of their function than Cicero had, or anybody 
else, indeed, until our modern times. Some jests, he 
said, “have in them a certein cleannesse and mod- 
est pleasantnesse; other bite sometime privily, other- 
while openlye.” But whatsoever causes laughter, “ the 
same maketh the minde jocunde and geveth pleasure, 
nor suffreth a man in that instant to minde the trouble- 
some greeffes that oure life is full of.” 

We may think of this as the last word spoken on the 
subject of laughter in freedom from the sovereign 
authority of Aristotle. What else the critics and com- 
mentators of the Renaissance had to say is but an 
amplification of the famous theory of comedy pre- 
sented in his “Poetics.” Tresseno in 1563 simply re- 
peated that theory in its original form; Maggi added to 
Aristotle’s definition of the occasion of laughter the idea 
of surprise and suddenness; and Robertelli in 1548, 
still describing the comic object as the slightly mean 
and ugly, developed the idea that the purpose of our 


THE DERISION THEORY 


139 


laughter at such objects is to supply a mild corrective, 
and help ourselves and others to avoid ungainliness 
and the small vices of life. Doctor Joubert, whose 
“ Treatise upon Laughter,” published in 1579, is the 
first exhaustive study of this subject, was also under 
the influence of Aristotle. He defined the ridiculous 
as “ something ugly or unseemly, which is at the same 
time unworthy of pity or compassion.” But he modi- 
fied the rigor of this idea by observing that our laughter 
at this ridiculous thing “does not come of pure joy, 
but has some little of sadness.” 

Thus it was not by any means an advance, but a 
shrinkage of man’s understanding of laughter, when 
Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century revived 
the derision theory of Plato and Aristotle in its most 
virulent form. 

“Sudden glory is the passion which maketh those Grimaces 
called Laughter/' said Hobbes in the “Leviathan,” “and is 
caused either by some sudden act of their own, that pleaseth 
them; or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, 
by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves. 
And it is incident most to them, that are conscious of the fewest 
abilities in themselves; who are forced to keep themselves in 
their own favour, by observing the imperfections of other men. 
And therefore much laughter at the defects of others, is a signe 
of Pusillanimity. For of great minds, one of the proper workes 
is, to help and free others from scorn; and compare themselves 
onely with the most able.” 

This is the most famous opinion about laughter 
ever expressed, and perhaps the most purely and per- 


140 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


fectly incorrect. Hobbes so explicitly identified hu- 
morous enjoyment with egotism and scorn, and drew 
therefrom so wry and erroneous a moral, that we might 
almost dismiss his remarks as a treatise upon sneers, 
if it were not for the word sudden which is advanced 
strongly, and intimates that even this bitter taste of 
joy must come in against our expectation if it is to 
have the quality of a jest. Hobbes did not develop 
this intimation, however, nor himself perceive its sig- 
nificance, and the fame of his theory rests upon its 
lucid simpleness, rather than upon any broad kinship 
with the truth. It rests upon the poetic felicity of 
the name, “ sudden glory.” 

Five or six different plans have been devised where- 
by to reconcile this conception of laughter with all 
the too evident facts to the contrary. The first was 
that one devised by Cicero — to say that when we laugh 
genially we are deriding ourselves. It was more 
fully developed by Robert de Lamennais in his “Es- 
quisse d’une Philosophie.” 

“The self,” he said, “which discovers the ridiculous in one 
of the inferior regions of its being, separates itself from that at 
which it laughs, distinguishes itself from it, and rejoices in\/ardly 
at a sagacity which elevates it in its own esteem. Thus pride 
feeds even upon the sight of certain weaknesses concealed in the 
folds of the heart, and which it has been able to discover. I am 
not the dupe of myself — so we say — and we admire ourselves 
for that.” 

A second method of compensating for the inade- 
quacy of his theory was proposed by Hobbes himself 


THE DERISION THEORY 


141 


in his “ Human Nature,” where he says that “ Laughter 
without offense must be at absurdities and infirmities 
abstracted from persons.” 

A third method was to mix a little feeling of the 
justice of one’s scorn, a little moral complacence, into 
the comic emotion. This was the contribution of 
Hobbes’s contemporary, Descartes, who says in “The 
Passions of the Soul”: “Derision or mockery is a kind 
of joy mixed with hate which comes from perceiving 
some little misfortune in a person whom we think 
worthy of it. We have hate for the evil, we have joy 
in seeing it in him who is worthy of it, and, when that 
happens unexpectedly, the surprise is the cause of our 
bursting out laughing.” 

A fourth and more ingenious way of tempering the 
derision theory was devised by the German psychol- 
ogist A. Zeising. He declared that the comic is a 
process consisting of three phases, in only the last of 
which do we experience that feeling of self-elevation 
which causes laughter. The first phase is a shock 
caused by an object which seems to amount to some- 
thing and yet does not; the second is a counter-shock 
in which we are freed from the deception and recognize 
the nothingness of the object; the third is our happy 
sense of superiority to that nothingness, which makes 
us burst out laughing. 

Karl Groos adopted this general account of the 
comic process, but took one further step away from 
the derision theory by declaring that in the second 
phase there is a moment of “inward imitation” of the 
absurdity. 


142 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


“The aesthetic attitude of consciousness,” he said, “can be 
found nowhere but in the situation which lies between the shock 
of deception and the counter-shock of enlightenment. In the 
first phase my ego is repelled from the object, in the third phase 
it emerges from it laughing. It must therefore during the sec- 
ond phase have been in the object, and just this transporting 
of oneself into the object is the characteristic of aesthetic percep- 
tion.” 

Comic perception becomes for him more and more 
aesthetic, then, in proportion as the proper cause of 
laughter, “ superiority to an absurdity,” is modified by 
a previous participation in the absurdity to which one 
feels superior. 

Another German psychologist, Ziegler, explained that 
we laugh at the stupidities and misfortunes of others 
only when they are slight and inconsequential, and our 
scorn is essentially playful. And this qualification of 
the derision theory was also indorsed by Karl Groos 
with his phrase “fighting-play.” But the total in- 
adequacy of the derision theory even in this form, is 
indicated in the fact that while Groos and Ziegler 
attributed playful derision to the person who laughs, 
another equally plausible theorist had attributed the 
same mood to the object of laughter. It is nature who 
is deriding us in the comic experience, according to 
Stephan Schiitze, bringing our intended sublimities to 
a fall, and showing us how limited our freedom really 
is — and what we enjoy is the more humble privilege of 
perceiving that she is playing a game ! 

The latest modification of the derision theory — pro- 
posed by Otto Schauer in 1910 — may be described as 


THE DERISION THEORY 


143 


an attempt to reconcile these two exactly opposite 
views. Schauer identified all kinds of comic enter- 
prise with teasing. 

“ Teasing/’ he said, “ is a game in which the players take the 
role of adversaries. One seeks to injure his adversary, one dis- 
closes his failings, one tries to deceive him, and so on. If the 
sport succeeds, it is naturally not Schadenfreude [joy in the suffer- 
ing of others] nor a feeling of superiority that one experiences, 
but it is the joy of play. As was said before, it belongs to the 
nature of play that one enjoys it not only when others are hood- 
winked or overcome, but also in the cases when one must him- 
self play the role of the hoodwinked and overcome/’ 

On the basis of these observations Schauer would di- 
vide all comic experience into two kinds, the objective- 
comic and the subjective-comic, the jokes in which we 
triumph and the jokes in which we are triumphed over. 

If our own theory is the true one, it is evident that 
Schauer was exceedingly “warm.” He was feeling in 
the right vicinity for the essence of humor, and had 
he but freed himself entirely from the assumption that 
egoistic hostility is fundamental in laughter, and so 
from his preoccupation with “teasing,” he might have 
made the necessary analysis of that more general idea, 
“the joy of play.” As it is, he remains the maturest 
of those who have tried to explain away a gratuitous 
assumption. 

Miss Lillien J. Martin, in one of the few empirical 
studies of humor that have been made, submitted to 
sixty persons a comic picture excellently fit to give rise 
to the feeling of “ superiority to an absurdity,” and 


144 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


asked them to describe their emotions. Her statement 
of the result was that “thirty-seven of the reagents 
have a feeling of superiority. . . . The remaining 
twenty-three report themselves as having no such 
feeling.” I looked at the picture, and was able to add 
one more to the twenty-three, w T hich makes twenty- 
four, and that is the sum of the empirical testimony 
upon this ancient subject of dispute. The picture 
excited in me a comic emotion, and I enjoyed it. I 
remember liking one of the absurd creatures that made 
me laugh. And yet I realize that if I myself had been 
in the picture, and all those “reagents” had come up 
and laughed while looking at me, I should have felt 
the superiority of the whole sixty, whether they did or 
not. I should have been impelled to attribute scorn 
to them because they were “making fun of me,” even 
though I knew that their own mood and motive was 
simply to make fun. 

M. Dugas says that “The English humorists offer 
models of raillery cruel, sarcastic, and cold; it is natural 
that a corresponding theory of laughter should be met 
with among English philosophers.” But I do not 
know any English philosopher who accepted Hobbes’s 
Theory without finding some way to soften its voice, 
or elude the extreme rigors of its application. Joseph 
Addison in some essays in The Spectator on the subject 
of False Wit, deferring to the authority of Hobbes, 
speaks of that “ secret elation and pride of heart which 
is generally called laughter.” But elsewhere in the 


THE DERISION THEORY 


145 


same essays he commends the more genial, if rather 
meaningless, statement of John Locke, that wit lies 
“most in the assemblage of ideas, and putting those 
together with quickness and variety, wherein can be 
found any resemblance and congruity, thereby to make 
up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the 
fancy.” Lord Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson 
both attacked Hobbes’s theory, and Hutcheson im- 
proved upon Locke by describing the cause of laughter 
as “the bringing together of images which have con- 
trary additional ideas, as well as some resemblance in 
the principal idea.” Alexander Bain, in “The Emo- 
tions and Will,” said that “ although Hobbes’s explana- 
tion might not be literally correct, yet he has probably 
touched, after all, upon one real point of this much 
disputed phenomenon. . . . Not in physical effects 
alone, but in everything whence a man can achieve a 
stroke of superiority, in surpassing or discomfiting a 
rival, is the disposition to laughter apparent.” But 
Bain also insisted that this was not the only nor indeed 
the principal cause of laughter, and he occupies a more 
distinguished place in another part of the story we 
are telling. 

George Meredith, in his tense but rather inconse- 
quential “Essay on Comedy,” while aligning himself 
with those who regard laughter as fundamentally an 
act of rejection, is nevertheless so concerned to paint a 
sage and humane understanding into his portrait of 
the Comic Spirit that he too may be quoted in mitiga- 
tion as well as in support of the theory of Hobbes, 


146 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


“If you believe that our civilization is founded in common- 
sense (and it is the first condition of sanity to believe it), you 
will, when contemplating men, discern a Spirit overhead; not 
more heavenly than the light flashed upward from glassy sur- 
faces, but luminous and watchful; never shooting beyond them, 
nor lagging in the rear; so closely attached to them that it may 
be taken for a slavish reflex, until its features are studied. It 
has the sage’s brows, and the sunny malice of a faun lurks at 
the corners of the half-closed lips drawn in an idle wariness of 
half tension. That slim feasting smile, shaped like the long- 
bow, was once a big round satyr’s laugh, that flung up the brows 
like a fortress lifted by gunpowder. The laugh will come again, 
but it will be of the order of the smile, finely tempered, showing 
sunlight of the mind, mental richness rather than noisy enormity. 
Its common aspect is one of unsolicitous observation, as if sur- 
veying a full field and having leisure to dart on its chosen mor- 
sels without any fluttering eagerness. Men’s future upon earth 
does not attract it; their honesty and shapeliness in the present 
does; and whenever they wax out of proportion, overblown, af- 
fected, pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic, fantas- 
tically delicate; whenever it sees them self-deceived or hood- 
winked, given to run riot in idolatries, drifting into vanities, 
congregating in absurdities, planning shortsightedly, plotting 
dementedly; whenever they are at variance with their profes- 
sions, and violate the unwritten but perceptible laws binding 
them in consideration one to another; whenever they offend 
sound reason, fair justice; are false in humility or mined with 
conceit, individually, or in the bulk — the Spirit overhead will 
look humanely malign and cast an oblique light on them, fol- 
lowed by volleys of silvery laughter. That is the Comic Spirit.” 

That is at least a rare beautification of Hobbes’s 
theory of the Comic Spirit, and is characteristic of 
what happened to that theory in England. The phi- 
losophers who seized the standard of “ sudden glory,” 
and advanced it without mercy or consideration either 


THE DERISION THEORY 


147 


for facts or the opinions of their contemporaries, are 
in fact the Frenchmen Hugues Felicite Robert de 
Lamennais and Henri Bergson. 

De Lamennais, in his “ Esquisse d’une Philosophic,” 
says that “ Laughter never gives to the physiognomy 
an expression of sympathy and of good will: exactly 
the contrary, it makes the most harmonious faces 
grimace, it effaces beauty, it is one of the images of 
evil.” What Lamennais means by evil is the sentiment 
of individuality, the attachment to self, as opposed to 
the tendency to lose oneself in the universal life. Even 
the first smile of an infant he describes as a movement 
toward self, and declares that smiling is evil only at 
a less high elevation than the more open grimace. 

“ Whatever be the cause which provokes laughter/’ he says, 
“go to the bottom of it, and you will find it constantly accom- 
panied, whether one avow it to himself or not, with a secret 
satisfaction of amour-propre, of I know not what malign pleasure. 
Whoever laughs at another believes himself at that moment 
superior to him in the aspect in which he views him, and which 
excites his laughter, and the laugh is everywhere the expression 
of the contentment which this real or imaginary superiority 
inspires/’ 

Upon the basis of these opinions Lamennais gives 
the extreme contradiction to that assertion of Socrates 
in the “ Symposium” that the genius of comedy and 
tragedy are the same. The one is moral and the other 
immoral, according to him. 

“ The one has its root in the instincts, the sympathetic powers, 
which lead man toward other men, and tend to unite him to 


148 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


them by the universal bond of sublime love; the other, on the 
contrary, is directly related to the sentiment of individuality, 
has its basis in the love of self, and tends to develop the egoistic 
instincts.” 

Bergson differs from Lamennais only in a more 
lenient temper, and in that he has found a use for this 
hostile grimace, and from the standpoint of the hopes 
of evolution, is able to call it good. 

“ In laughter,” he says, “we always find an unavowed inten- 
tion to humiliate, and consequently to correct our neighbor, 
if not in his will, at least in his deed. . . . Laughter is incom- 
patible with emotion. Depict some fault, however trifling, in 
such a way as to arouse sympathy, fear, or pity; the mischief is 
done, it is impossible for us to laugh.” 

It seems as though these authors never enjoyed a 
moment of hilarity, and I am sure that they never came 
into cordial relations with a baby. For either of these 
experiences would have taught them more than all 
they have said in their discourses about laughter. 
Bergson’s ideas have the plausibility, however, that is 
possessed by everything interesting, and his account 
of the nature of the inferiorities we correct with laugh- 
ter has gained credence because of its relation to his 
beautiful philosophy of Creative Evolution. He de- 
scribes these inferiorities as “ the rigid, the ready-made, 
the mechanical, in contrast with the supple, the ever- 
changing and the living, absent-mindedness in contrast 
with attention, in a word automatism in contrast with 
free activity.” Laughter is on the side of life and of 


THE DERISION THEORY 


149 


intelligence always, he says. We never laugh at a 
thing. What we laugh at is “that side of a person 
which reveals his likeness to a thing, that aspect of 
human events which, through its peculiar inelasticity, 
conveys the impression of pure mechanism, of automa- 
tism, of movement without life. Consequently it ex- 
presses an individual or collective imperfection which 
calls for an immediate corrective. This corrective is 
laughter. ...” 

There is a true significance in Bergson’s assertion 
that we never laugh at a thing. We are not easily 
able to project our expectations into things, and imagine 
them as adopting attitudes of purpose, and they are 
not often, therefore, the purveyors to our imagination 
of what I have called practical humor. It is only as 
objects of poetic perception that they can seem funny 
to us, and then only when we are led to approach them 
in an attitude of play — as we are, for instance, in these 
remarks from the pen of Irvin Cobb: 

“ There are certain things which both writers and comedians 
have found by testing to be almost as funny for general purposes 
as whiskers. ... A cheese is always funny, whether written 
about, described or exhibited. Limburger is the funniest brand 
with Camembert next. Right alongside of cheese, and running 
it a close race in the popular favor as a humor asset, I would rate 
the onion. The lemon, which has attained a sort of transient 
hold on the public fancy here of late years, can never, in my 
humble opinion, hope to rival the onion as a permanent favorite. 
It lacks the drawing and holding qualities of the onion. After 
all a lemon isn’t near as funny, really, as a banana. But the 
onion is immortal; it is an epic; it is elemental humor. And so 


150 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


is cheese. Semper Edam , as the Latins say, signifying, I take it, 
‘ Always the cheese. . . .’ 

“A ham is funny, a sausage is positively uproarious, and fish- 
balls are sort of laughable; but a veal stew is regarded as possess- 
ing few, if any, of the true elements of humor. Soup is still 
funny, but not as funny as it was a few years back. Hash is im- 
mensely humorous, but a croquette is not. Yet, what is a cro- 
quette but hash that has come to a head ? ” 

We have here the authority of a flourishing humor- 
ist for the assertion that things can be laughable, and 
also a kind of demonstration that they are. And it 
would seem, too, from his testimony, that the most 
inert things are not usually so laughable as those which 
show signs of an elan vital . One of Aristophanes’s 
great jokes was the coming to life of an intelligent 
corpse on its way to hell. And I remember an appear- 
ance of Barnum’s Circus in which the chief comedy 
part was played by an empty Ford car, which followed 
its master about in a most diligently understanding 
fashion, and whose each sagacious act was greeted with 
uproarious screams from those who knew its mechani- 
cal inwards all too well. We do not only laugh when 
intelligent creatures behave like machines; we laugh 
also when machines behave like intelligent creatures; 
and we laugh oftener than that. 

It is the art of satire, and not the nature of laughter, 
that Bergson has written about. And we might per- 
haps point to Moliere and Daumier and Anatole France 
as among the greatest refiners of this art, and so assert — 
in the face of M. Dugas — that France is the peculiar 


THE DERISION THEORY 


151 


home of the humor that laughs through its teeth. It 
happens, however, that such an assertion would have 
no more objective truth than his own statement about 
England, or than any other of the vanities of intellec- 
tual patriotism. The greatest jovial laugher of all 
the universe was Francois Rabelais, and the philosopher 
who first fully realized the affirmative character of 
laughter in general — if we except that very hydraulic 
Saint and that genial Courtier of whom I have spoken — 
was Voltaire. 

“Laughter always arises,” said Voltaire, “from a gaiety of 
disposition, absolutely incompatible with contempt and indig- 
nation.” 

How delightful is the positiveness of his opinion ! 
It may well relieve us of obeisance to an ungracious 
theory, which might perhaps never have arisen but for 
an accidental connection of the muscles with which we 
express scorn and pleasure. 


CHAPTER IV 

THE DISAPPOINTMENT THEORY 

Spinoza was a more careful philosopher than Hobbes, 
and the most grave and consecrated reasoner about 
real good and evil that ever lived. His judgment, 
therefore, that derision is an evil thing, a thing that 
hinders the being of man, but that jests promote his 
being and are good, is of greater weight than the 
casual remarks of more discursive philosophers. It 
is testimony of some consequence in a science which 
must rest to a great extent upon introspective feeling. 
Spinoza had classified derision, with propriety accord- 
ing to his system, as one of the forms of hate, and 
he added: 

“ I recognize a great difference between derision (which in 
Corollary 1 above is termed bad) and laughter or jest. For 
laughter and jest are a kind of joy, and so, if they are only not 
excessive are good.” 

Even before Spinoza, indeed, there was opposition 
to the idea of Hobbes and Descartes that mockery 
and scornful pride are in the heart of all laughter. 
There was still living the other opinion of Aristotle, 
as appears in the remark of Pascal that “ Nothing 
produces laughter more than a surprising dispropor- 
tion between that which one expects and that which 

152 


THE DISAPPOINTMENT THEORY 153 


one sees.” This opinion did not rise to a position 
of authority in modern philosophy, however, until it 
appeared in the aesthetics of Immanuel Kant. Kant’s 
statement is as boldly unqualified as that of Hobbes, 
and would shine out as clearly in memory, had it been 
as ably expressed. 

“Laughter ” he says, “is an affection arising from the sudden 
transformation of a strained expectation into nothing.” And after 
a few words of illustration: “We must note well that it does not 
transform itself into the positive opposite of an expected object — 
for then there would still be something, which might even be a 
cause of grief — but it must be transformed into nothing.” 

As an example he cites the story of “a merchant 
returning from India to Europe with all his wealth in 
merchandise, who was forced to throw it overboard in 
a heavy storm, and who grieved thereat so much that 
his wig turned gray the same night.” He says that in 
relating this story we should describe the merchant’s 
grief very circumstantially, so that our hearers will be 
led to expect some vast evidence of anguish in the con- 
clusion, and then they will “laugh and be gratified” 
all the more at the nothing which arrives. 

Kant’s example reveals both the correctness and the 
inadequacy of his theory. For the statement that a 
man’s wig turned gray is in truth “nothing” — a pre- 
tentious nothing — from the standpoint of the specific 
expectation involved; but from the standpoint of our 
general sentimental contempt for merchants, and the 
pecuniary sources of their grief, it is also decidedly 


154 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


something. And the something — unlucky for the 
author — is “ sudden glory” of the most obvious kind. 

Kant's idea was repeated, and a little of the meta- 
physical excitement about freedom and necessity im- 
ported into it, by Friedrich Schelling, but until the 
time of Schopenhauer it was not intelligibly altered 
or developed. Schopenhauer was like a god in his 
conviction of the truth and originality of his own 
opinions, but I cannot see that he did much in this 
field except to narrow the conception of Kant so that 
it applied only to disappointments of an intellectual 
kind. 

“ The cause of laughter in every case/’ he said, “ is simply the 
sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the 
real objects which have been thought through it in some rela- 
tion, and laughter itself is just the expression of this incon- 
gruity. . . . The more correct the subsumption of such ob- 
jects under a concept may be from one point of view, and the 
greater and more glaring their incongruity with it, from another 
point of view, the greater is the ludicrous effect which is produced 
by this contrast. All laughter then is occasioned by a paradox, 
and therefore by unexpected subsumption, whether this is ex- 
pressed in words or actions. This, briefly stated, is the true 
explanation of the ludicrous.” And again: “In everything that 
excites laughter it must always be possible to show a concept 
and a particular, that is, a thing or event, which certainly can 
be subsumed under that concept, and therefore thought through 
it, yet in another and more predominating aspect does not be- 
long to it at all, but is strikingly different from everything else 
that is thought through that concept. If, as often occurs, espe- 
cially in witticisms, instead of such a real object of perception, 
the concept of a subordinate species is brought under the higher 
concept of the genus, it will yet excite laughter only through the 


THE DISAPPOINTMENT THEORY 155 


fact that the imagination realizes it, i. e., makes a perceptible 
representative stand for it, and thus the conflict between what is 
thought and what is perceived takes place.” 

If we examine all these great words carefully, we 
shall find that they are only the rather formidable 
definition of a mistake. And it is interesting to remem- 
ber that long before their appearance Voltaire, in his 
Preface to “L’Enfant Prodigue,” had observed that 
“a mistake” is the only thing that ever awakens “ vio- 
lent peals of universal laughter.” Schopenhauer added 
to this, however, an original attempt to explain why 
mistakes awaken laughter. 

“In every suddenly appearing conflict,” he said, “between 
what is perceived and what is thought, what is perceived is al- 
ways unquestionably right; for it is not subject to error at all, 
requires no confirmation from without, but answers for itself. 
Its conflict with what is thought springs ultimately from the 
fact that the latter, with its abstract conceptions, cannot get 
down to the infinite multifariousness and fine shades of difference 
of the concrete. This victory of knowledge of perception over 
thought affords us pleasure. For perception is the original kind 
of knowledge inseparable from animal nature, in which every- 
thing that gives direct satisfaction to the will presents itself. 
It is the medium of the present, of enjoyment and gayety; more- 
over it is attended with no exertion. . . . Besides, it is the con- 
ceptions of thought that often oppose the gratification of our 
immediate desires, for as the medium of the past, the future, 
and of seriousness, they are the vehicle of our fears, our repen- 
tance, and all our cares. It must therefore be diverting to us 
to see this strict, untiring, troublesome governess, the reason, 
for once convicted of insufficiency. On this account then the 
mien or appearance of laughter is very closely related to that 
of joy.” 


156 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


It seems that Schopenhauer enjoyed with a deep 
understanding those jokes whose affirmative value is 
what we have called reality, or the simple truth. But 
it needs little argument to show that this value cannot 
explain the enjoyment of jokes in general. In the first 
place we have no such exclusive zeal as this for percep- 
tual knowledge. In the second place what zeal we 
have is not humorous. And in the third place we do 
not need to make intellectual mistakes in order to en- 
joy humor. We do not need to “ subsume particulars 
under a concept/’ or even indeed to exercise that de- 
gree of imagination implied in the word “ expect.” 
We need only to experience a forward motion of inter- 
est sufficiently definite so that its “ coming to nothing” 
can be felt. This might have been brought home 
to Schopenhauer by calling his attention to the hu- 
morous quality which is sometimes possessed by music, 
for he was very sure that music has to do with '“the 
will” and not “the idea.” I read in the London Spec - 
tator that Beethoven exhibits a humor “freakish, un- 
expected and at times obstreperous,” and I suppose 
the statement will pass without challenge, although his 
music is, for the .most part, faithful to the view of Scho- 
penhauer, and does not pretend to represent things or 
ideas. Its humor cannot be reconciled with Schopen- 
hauer’s statement that “it is possible to trace every- 
thing laughable to a syllogism of the first figure with an 
undisputed major and unexpected minor, which to a 
certain extent is only sophistically valid.” And neither 
can the innumerable little giggles and fleet smiles of im- 


THE DISAPPOINTMENT THEORY 157 


pulsive and real life be reconciled with it. Comic 
laughter is too quick for Schopenhauer’s description. 
It is more like a reflex action than a mental result. It 
arises in the very act of perception, when that act is 
brought to nothing by two conflicting qualities of fact 
or ieeling. It arises when some numb habitual activity, 
suddenly obstructed, first appears in consciousness with 
an announcement of its own failure. The blockage of 
an instinct, a collision between two instincts, the inter- 
ruption of a habit, a “ conflict of habit systems,” a dis- 
turbed or misapplied reflex — all these catastrophes, as 
well as the coming to nothing of an effort at conceptual 
thought, must enter into the meaning of the word disap- 
pointment, if it is to explain the whole field of practical 
humor. The “ strain” in that expectation Kant speaks 
of is what makes it capable of humorous collapse. It 
is an active expectation. The feelings are involved. 
The will, as Schopenhauer in all other matters taught 
us to know, is fundamental, and humor is one of its 
own children. 

Schopenhauer does not seem to have been conscious 
of the extreme intellectualism of his view of humor, but 
Leon Dumont, who adopted the same view, made this 
the essential feature of it. 

“ We laugh,” he said, “every time that our intelligence finds 
itself in the presence of facts which are of a nature to make us 
think of one and the same thing, that it is and that it is not. . . . 
We are, for example, accustomed to associate the idea of such a 
quality to the idea of such an exterior sign; if this sign appears, 
the idea of the quality which is associated with it will be imme- 


158 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


diately suggested to the mind; but if, at the same moment, we 
discover by other signs that the object has not at all this quality, 
that it possesses indeed the contrary quality, there is produced 
in the intelligence a peculiar collision, a shock from which the 
rebound makes itself felt in the diaphragm and translates itself 
into laughter.” 

In order to prove that this comic collision occurs 
“in the intelligence,” and not anywhere else, Dumont 
made an investigation of the fine art of tickling, which 
is memorable as one of the few ventures into this field 
in the spirit of empirical science. 

“ Announce to an irritable person,” he said, “that you are 
going to pinch him at such a place and at such a moment; if he 
perceives the sensation just at the moment and the place that 
he expected it, he does not laugh at all. Make, on the contrary, 
a gesture as though to pinch him, and do not really pinch him, 
he laughs immediately. . . . Does not this lead us to think 
that the laughter depends less upon sensations of the skin than 
upon a deceived expectation? .... 

“We have made the following observations upon tickling: 

“1st. When one passes a finger over the skin of another 
person, without any change of direction or of speed and with- 
out interruption, one does not make him laugh; it is not tickling. 

“2nd. When one makes successive touches follow each other 
at the same place or in a constant direction, one does not cause 
laughter either, if the touches take place at equal intervals of 
time. But laughter is produced when the intervals are not the 
same. 

“3rd. Laughter is produced also when, the intervals being 
equal, there are unexpected changes in the direction of the suc- 
cessive touches. 

“ 4th. When there is no interruption of contact, one may still 
cause laughter, either by varying the rapidity, or changing the 
direction of the movements. 


THE DISAPPOINTMENT THEORY 159 


“5th. We do not laugh when we tickle ourselves. 

“To sum up, the laughter appears to have its cause not in the 
sensation of contact itself, but in the variations of speed, of 
direction or of interval. It is further necessary that the varia- 
tions be unexpected, and that is why one cannot cause laughter 
by tickling himself.” 

I believe the reader will find that he cannot com- 
pletely verify these observations. It is true that a de- 
ceived expectation is enough all by itself to cause 
laughter, but it is not true that laughter cannot be 
caused without deceiving the expectation. M. Du- 
mont has observed and proven the fact that our laugh- 
ter in tickling is peculiarly independent of the actual 
sensations of touch, but in passing from that to the 
assertion that it depends upon an intellectual factor, he 
is guided by his theory rather than by the facts. The 
peculiarity here is not only that we laugh loudly when 
we are not touched at all after vividly awaiting it, but 
also that we laugh happily when we are touched, even 
though the sensation is so acute as to be in its own 
intrinsic nature painful. James Sully agrees with 
Dumont that “some conceptual factor ” must ex- 
plain our pleasure in this apparently unpleasant ex- 
perience. But Oswald Kiilpe comes nearer, I believe, 
to the true explanation, when he says that “The ex- 
pressive movement of laughter, which often accom- 
panies tickling and stands in apparent contradiction to 
the movements of repulsion, is probably not the effect 
of the common sensation but of feelings arising from 
the comicality of the situation.” Any one who has ever 


160 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


participated in a tickling bout will smile at the idea 
that his laughter was attendant upon the perception 
of a “ situation,” and he may think that “ expressive 
movement” is a very unrealistic name for it. But 
nevertheless the words “ feeling” and “ comicality,” 
if Kiilpe had not artificially separated them, do offer 
the one possibility of a simple description of this ex- 
perience. It is a comical feeling , and not “ some con- 
ceptual factor,” that enters in when laughter mingles 
with our movements of defense. And that this happens 
only in that condition of the instincts which we de- 
scribe as play, is nowhere more expressly stated than 
in Sully’s own account. 

“ The tickling must fit in with a particular mood, the state of 
mind which makes enjoyment of fun not only possible but wel- 
come. . . . The dreadfully serious ‘on the alarm’ attitude of 
the child when nursed by a stranger is an effectual bar to play- 
ful overtures. A child when cross will not, says Dr. L. Hill, 
give genial response, even if the attacker be his familiar tickler, 
father or nurse; and the same is true, he adds, of a child when 
suffering from vaccination, or when mentally preoccupied with 
some hurt for which he is seeking for sympathy, or with a story 
which he wants you to tell him. As Darwin puts it, the great 
subjective condition of the laughter of tickling is that the child’s 
mind be in "a pleasurable condition/ the state of mind which 
welcomes fun in all its forms.” 

All these observations support the hypothesis that 
the play-attitude is a definite condition of our nervous 
systems, and that the humorous instinct is somehow 
inherent in the attitude of play. And I think that 


THE DISAPPOINTMENT THEORY 161 


Dumont’s experiments also, so far as they can be veri- 
fied, tend rather to the same conclusion. His business- 
like tickling must have had somewhat the same lifeless 
quality as an explained joke. What we have to thank 
him for, therefore, is just the experimental confirma- 
tion of Kant’s assertion that a strained expectation 
which comes to absolutely nothing may cause a humor- 
ous recoil. 

Two other empirical studies have given some sup- 
port to what I call the disappointment theory of laugh- 
ter. Miss Lillien J. Martin, in her “ experimental pros- 
pecting” in this field, presented to sixty persons who 
had been observing their feelings in the presence of 
funny things a number of classic definitions of the comic, 
and a majority selected that of Schopenhauer as the 
truest to their experience. They also agreed that an 
element of “ unexpectedness,” as well as of “ contrast,” 
was always present in the things at which they laughed. 
And they confirmed the popular impression that jokes 
as they grow familiar, and capable of being quickly 
anticipated, cease to have any comic quality whatever. 

This impression was further confirmed and a little 
modified through a series of experiments conducted 
by H. L. Hollingsworth, who succeeded in demon- 
strating with an elaborate system of curves the rate at 
which various jokes wane in value as they grow stale. 
He discovered that while all jokes wane more rapidly 
and completely than is usual with verbal objects of 
esteem, they do not all wane with equal rapidity and 
completeness. A certain group which are very much 


162 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


appreciated at first, lose their value faster than the 
others and, from being selected among the best of the 
group at the beginning of the experiments, arrive 
among the poorest at the end, while some even increase 
in value a little upon second or third acquaintance. This 
result was offered by the author as a possible support 
to Schauer’s distinction between the objective and the 
subjective comic, but I do not believe that any one 
distinction would explain it. Poetic jokes endure 
longer than practical jokes, and yet they cannot be 
“cracked” quite so smartly at the beginning. And 
jokes whose value lies mainly in what they do mean, en- 
dure longer than those whose main value is the ab- 
surdity of their not meaning what they seem to. Hol- 
lingsworth does not feel sure enough about Schauer’s 
hypothesis, or about these jokes of his, to present them 
for our consideration, and as the theme and principal 
outcome of his study was to establish the peculiar 
vapidity of repeated jokes, it seems fair to give a part 
at least of the credit of his testimony to the Disappoint- 
ment Theory. It is because they require a “strained 
expectation” that practical jokes can not be fully en- 
joyed but once. 

And so this theory, which Aristotle first expressed 
in his “Rhetoric,” has found at least as much sup- 
port in modern science as the more famous one in 
the “Poetics.” It is a fact worth remembering also, 
that in the Oriental books which correspond to Aris- 
totle’s “Rhetoric” and “Poetics,” and which more 
nearly approach a real psychology of the emotions, the 


THE DISAPPOINTMENT THEORY 163 


flavor of the derision theory is entirely absent, and the 
cause of laughter is described as something “ strange” or 
“ distorted” — that is, contrary to our customary expec- 
tations. In the Dasarupa, a Sanskrit treatise on the 
forms of the drama dating from the tenth century, we 
learn that “ mirth (hasa) is caused by one’s own or 
another’s strange actions, words, or attire; the develop- 
ment of this is .declared to be the comic sentiment 
(hasya).” And in the “Sahitya Darpana,” or “Mirror 
of Composition,” a similar opinion is expressed in these 
words: 

“The comic in which the permanent condition is mirth, and 
which according to the fancy of the mythologists, is white-colored, 
and has the attendants of Siva as its presiding deities — may 
arise from the fun of distorted shapes, words, dresses, gestures, 
etc. Whatever a person laughs at, when he beholds it distorted 
in respect of form, speech, or gesture, this they call the f substan- 
tial’ element of the comic” 


These philosophers succeeded, as Aristotle did not, 
in describing the comic object upon the stage in a way 
consistent with their description of the comic element 
in a joke. And their tribute to the Disappointment 
Theory may be strengthened with the observation often 
repeated in modern books about humor that children 
and savages usually greet with laughter anything that 
is new. 

The Disappointment Theory has also found expres- 
sion in modern literature, and may be summed up once 
more in the words of William Hazlitt: 


164 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


“ We weep at what thwarts or exceeds our desires in serious 
matters, we laugh at what only disappoints our expectations in 
trifles.” 

It is in the general tenor of this theory that the most 
original contributions of modern thought to the science 
of humor have been made. 


CHAPTER V 

THE DISCOVERY OF BENIGN HUMOR 

The first of these modem contributions was the dis- 
covery and celebration of benign humor as a great and 
significant kind of wisdom, an art and yet also a phi- 
losophy of gracious life. This discovery was authenti- 
cated and recorded in literature by the German roman- 
tics and by Jean Paul Richter and Hegel and his dis- 
ciples, but it was not made by them nor by any person 
who can be identified. It was made by the English 
language. In the centuries before Shakespeare the 
word humor , which signifies in its origin a condition of 
moisture, was applied to those four fluids which were 
supposed to determine the temperament of the indi- 
vidual — blood, phlegm, choler, and black choler or 
melancholy. It was throughout the Middle Ages a 
physiological word. But as early at least as the year 
1475 it began to be applied to the temperaments them- 
selves, or the states of emotion created by a varying 
mixture of these fluids. In a passage of “Othello” we 
can see this transition still occurring: 

“Is he not jealous?” says Emil, and Desdemona 
replies: 

“ Who he? I think the sun where he was bom 
Drew all such humors from him.” 

The moods and characters which bother us enough 
to compel our seeking a physiological explanation are 

165 


166 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


naturally the ugly or sad ones, and for that reason this 
physiological word had at first a rather dark conno- 
tation. “The Duke is humorous,” in “As You Like 
It,” probably means “The Duke is grouchy!” And 
that is the temper of the French word humeur, when 
it is not modified by an adjective, even to-day. But 
in English, in proportion as the physiological remi- 
niscence dropped away, the word humor was more and 
more used to signify any pronounced tendency or dis- 
position whatever. The idea of irreducible character 
and individuality came into it. I think the word “hu- 
morist” in Shakespeare means a person who enter- 
tains by a consistently quaint or eccentric or obstrep- 
erous behavior, rather than by an ugly or ill-natured 
behavior. It is the same quality of entertainment 
that Aristotle, lacking any single word, described in 
his “Rhetoric” as “saying out-of-the-way things.” 
And so it was along this path of appreciating the unique 
or unexpected in character — a kind of consecration of 
whims and human accidents, that the word humor in 
the century following Shakespeare crept into the lan- 
guage of those who discussed laughter and the comic. 
And it brought to them a great illumination and warm- 
ing up of their ideas. It permitted them to associate 
laughter with love, and prepared them to welcome 
with a special terminology the new and exceedingly 
good-natured works of comic genius which were soon 
to appear — the works of Fielding and Sterne and 
Goldsmith, and of Jean Paul Richter. 

English literary patriots have frequently maintained 


THE DISCOVERY OF BENIGN HUMOR 167 


that humor was not only discovered, but actually born, 
upon the British Islands — a fact which need not surprise 
those Americans who think that by comparison with 
them the British possess no humor at all, since these 
two opinions have the same fond motive, and the same 
want of facts to support them. Humor was not born 
upon any island, nor does it make its abode in the 
breast of any chosen people. There is indeed a question 
whether it can be claimed as a distinguishing attribute 
of mankind. But we can safely predict that if that 
question is ever decided by some distinguished scien- 
tist in the negative, and certain of the higher animals 
are admitted into the circles of those who know when 
to laugh, they will be French poodles, or Scotch collies, 
or English bulldogs, or Belgian hares, or American 
jackasses, or some other patriotic blood-cousins of the 
scientist himself. For it is a universal law of the his- 
tory of folly that the sense of humor should be conceived 
to stop at the boundaries of every nationality, no mat- 
ter what other commodities may pass across. 

Humor is universal and as old as the origins of man, 
but because the first men who thought about humor 
analytically were intellectual in their tastes, and be- 
cause they confused laughter with the act of scoffing, 
the earliest names and definitions of humor described 
only its more intellectual and bitter forms. With the 
great thrusting forth of popular and simple life into 
literature and art which has characterized our modern 
era, the inadequacy of all those names and definitions 
became evident, and in the eighteenth century the 


168 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


English word humor was adopted into every one of the 
languages of western civilization, from Finland to the 
Spanish peninsula, to describe the more genial and 
characteristic excursions of the comic spirit. That is 
the extraordinary thing which has happened. And 
because these excursions are more characteristic, and 
more revealing of the original function of laughter in 
the history of life, than satire, or wit, or what we are 
now inclined to call comic, the word humor is grad- 
ually supplanting such words as a designation of the 
subject of this science in general. And that phrase, 
“The sense of humor” — a casual expression, I believe, 
even in the eighteenth century — is becoming an estab- 
lished name for this instinct which responds to playful 
pains and to poetic and practical jokes with laughter. 
The creation of that name is the most original and the 
most profound contribution of modern thought to the 
problem of the comic. 

It would be idle to rehearse the attempts of all the 
literary critics and philosophers of sentiment in all 
languages to define the word humor, and distinguish 
it from the rather hard, reptilly thing they had con- 
ceived the comic in general to be. Out of twenty-five 
or thirty of these definitions which I have read, I can 
extract this much of common agreement, that there is 
an absence of scorn in humor, a presence of emotion, 
and that humor is an excellent thing. Carlyle’s defi- 
nition is characteristic: 

“ True humor springs not more from the head than from the 
heart; it is not contempt, its essence is love; it issues not in 


THE DISCOVERY OF BENIGN HUMOR 169 


laughter, but in still smiles which lie far deeper. It is a sort of 
inverse sublimity, exalting, as it were, into our affection what is 
below us, while sublimity draws down into our affections what 
is above us.” 

It was from the German that Carlyle borrowed the 
flavor of these beautiful sentences. And wherever it 
may have been born, it was in Germany that the literary 
appreciation of humor flourished to its heaviest bloom. 
For Jean Paul and those who followed him, humor was 
not only an art, but also an ethics and a philosophy of 
life. What we laugh at, he thought, is the petty, the 
infinitesimal, when it is brought into contrast with our 
ideal of infinite sublimity. And since all human things 
are, in contrast with that ideal, petty and infinitesimal, 
the tendency of our laughter is to promote sympathy 
for mankind, and give at the same time the greater 
glory to God. Jean Paul ingeniously explained that 
when we laugh at the stupidity of other people, it is 
only because we have imputed, or as he says “loaned,” 
to them our insight, and thus in them been able to per- 
ceive the contrast between a minimum and a maximum 
of such insight. His metaphysical grandiloquizing 
upon the terms sublime and ridiculous , infinitely little 
and infinitely great , is fruitless of true meaning, and 
that I suppose was the essence of its emotional value. 
But his mellow assertion that “the jest has no other 
purpose but its own being — the poetic bloom of its 
nettle does not sting, and one can scarcely feel the blow 
of its flowering switch full of leaves,” was reinforced 


170 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 

with a good caustic criticism of Hobbes’s theory of 
laughter. 

“ In the first place,” he said, “the feeling of pride is very se- 
rious, and not at all related to the comic, albeit related to con- 
tempt which is likewise serious. In laughter one feels not so 
much that he himself is elevated (often perhaps the contrary) 
as that others are lowered. That tickle of self-comparison would 
have to enter as comic pleasure into every perception of the 
errors of others, and be the more laughable the higher one stood, 
but the contrary is true, one often experiences with pain the sub- 
jection of others. . . . Laughers are good-natured and place 
themselves often in rank and file with those they laugh at; chil- 
dren and women laugh most; the proud self-comparer the least; 
and the harlequin who holds himself worthless laughs over every- 
thing, and the proud Mussulman over nothing. No one is 
ashamed of having laughed, but we should be ashamed of such 
a gross elevation of ourselves as Hobbes describes. And finally 
no laugher takes it badly, but right well, if a hundred thousand 
others laugh with him, and thus a hundred thousand self-eleva- 
tions surround his; which would be impossible if Hobbes were 
right.” 

Jean Paul is the only humorist who ever diligently 
tried to explain humor, and his testimony upon the 
side of the genial explanation is important. He tells 
us that to him in the mood of comic enjoyment, any- 
thing satirical “ sharply bursting out” was actually 
“disturbing,” and that confession is of more value than 
his theory. It may be placed alongside Aristophanes’s 
praise of Comedy, and Rabelais’s definition of Panta- 
gruelism, and Voltaire’s exclamation about laughter, 
and the remark that I quoted from Charlie Chaplin, 


THE DISCOVERY OF BENIGN HUMOR 171 


in proof that humorists at least have not been numb to 
the original quality of humor. And thereto may be 
added Laurence Sterne’s assertion that if his book “is 
wrote against anything — ’tis wrote, an’ please your 
worships, against the spleen,” and Byron’s confession 
that 

“ If I laugh at any mortal thing, 

Tis that I may not weep.” 

Even Heine’s bitter praise of laughter concludes with 
a refrain in harmony with this more genial view. 

“And when the heart in the body is torn, 

Torn and bleeding and broken, 

We still have laughter beautiful and shrill.” 

Hegel was not so wise as Jean Paul in his apprecia- 
tion of laughter, which he described as “little more 
than an expression of self-satisfied shrewdness,” but he 
drew a sharp distinction between the ridiculous objects 
which cause this expression and the humor which we 
enjoy a little more soberly. And he brought all the 
weight of his authority, and the additional weight of 
his unintelligibility, to the opinion that true humor 
invites us to a sympathetic experience, and that the 
highest form of comedy is that in which the character 
himself enjoys his superiority to circumstance. 

“Inseparable from the comic,” he said, “is an infinite geni- 
ality and confidence, capable of rising superior to its own con- 
tradiction, and experiencing therein no taint of bitterness nor 
sense of misfortune whatever. It is the happy frame of mind, 
a hale condition of soul, which, fully aware of itself, can suffer 
the dissolution of its aims.” 


172 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


Hegel cited the Comedies of Aristophanes and the 
character of Sir John Falstaff as examples of this true 
and highest kind of humor. But he might also have 
had the support of the ancient Sanscrit dramatists, 
or at least of their philosopher-critics. The comic 
excitants, says the “Sahitya Darpana,” “ cannot be 
realized in their completeness, unless we suppose a 
Hero, under the influence of the sentiment, exhibiting 
his sense of the ludicrous by external marks. . . . 
These excitants, are apprehended by reason of there 
being through sympathy an indentification of the 
spectator with the actor ; and thence is this flavor, ‘the 
comic,’ experienced by the spectators.” 

In spite of this wisdom of his simpler self, Hegel’s 
philosophizing about humor was less laudatory than 
that of Jean Paul. Seeing that in comic laughter we 
are inwardly pleased at what outwardly seems unsatis- 
factory, he declared that the “Absolute Idea” which 
has been seeking in the other forms of art to embody 
itself in the objective world, here gives up the attempt, 
and simply turns back to expatiate in its own inner self. 
Thus “ it is comedy that opens a way to the dissolution 
of all that art implies.” 

It was the task of Hegel’s followers to prevent this 
disaster from flowing logically out of the postulates of 
his system, and they fulfilled it with a “German tho- 
roughness.” Humor ascended in their speculations to 
a height even above that to which Jean Paul had as- 
signed it. Weisse, in his “System of ^Esthetics,” 
declared that humor, instead of destroying art, en- 


THE DISCOVERY OF BENIGN HUMOR 173 


riches it by raising the ugly and distasteful into its do- 
main, and he defined the comic as “ ugliness elevated or 
the reconstitution of beauty out of her absolute nega- 
tion/’ In the main, however, it was not by defending 
our right to ignore the objective character of things 
that Hegel’s followers outwitted him, but by pointing 
out that in the humor of art an objective value does 
usually come to the support of that inward “expatia- 
tion” of the Idea, which he had declared to be the 
essence of this experience. That is to say, in plain 
language, that as he had glorified the negative, they 
glorified the positive, element in the point of a joke. 

“ The comic/’ says Lotze, “ does not empty the objective world 
of the Idea in order to let subjective phantasy reign in its place, 
but rather it moves us to rejoice in the fact that the Idea cannot 
be driven out of reality. This, with the additional remark, how- 
ever, that the idea which remains in the world is not the same 
one contemplated from the opposite point-of-view. That all 
beautiful individual schemes of definite aesthetic formation come 
to nothing, the comic does indeed teach us; it comforts us only 
in this, that the Idea remains underlying as a universal formless 
infinite possibility for the emerging of these individual ever- 
transitory formations.” 

By such arguments humor was raised upon the wings 
of German philosophy almost to the height of a devo- 
tion, and it was actually defined by one pious philoso- 
pher, Lazarus, as “the religion of the mind.” 

“For the mind in humor,” he said, “ is related to the Idea and 
to Reality exactly as the whole feeling of man in religion is re- 
lated to God and the World. The two basic elements of religion 


174 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


are just these, that on the one hand man finds himself and all 
the world deeply bowed and humiliated, because finite and sin- 
ful, feeble and transitory, before his God, but that on the other 
hand he feels himself elevated over all the world and towards 
his God, who is near even to his sinful heart, and he is certain 
that he will ultimately wander or be led into the heavenly light. 
Similarly the humorous mind sees itself and its actual life far 
from the Idea, powerless to attain its goal and its desire, and 
therefore tamed and broken in its pride, and oft even condemned 
to the despondent fierce laughter of self-contempt, and yet on 
the other hand elevated and purified through the consciousness 
that in spite of all, it possesses the Idea and the Infinite within 
itself, and in its even so imperfect works it reveals them and 
lives them forth, and is itself most inwardly at one with them, 
if only through the painful recognition they bring of its own im- 
perfection/ ' 

Thus the simple scientific truth about humor, more 
nearly stated by Hegel perhaps than by any other 
great philosopher, was, in true Hegelian fashion, ob- 
scured and vaporized and rendered a mere vehicle of 
metaphysical soulful emotions. 


CHAPTER VI 

THE MECHANICAL THEORY 

It was characteristic of science in the later nine- 
teenth century to drop all these vague but significant 
emotions and go in for an explanation of laughter upon 
the mere ground of cerebral mechanics. The hint of 
such an explanation was contained in Leon Dumont’s 
idea of an “ intellectual collision” which “ translates 
itself” into these motions of the diaphragm. But the 
classic and supreme expression of it is Herbert Spen- 
cer’s essay on “The Physiology of Laughter.” Spencer 
undertook to explain all laughter — or at least all comic 
laughter, for he sensed the existence of other kinds — 
in the same manner that you would explain the opera- 
tion of a pump or siphon. It is simply an overflow, 
along the most ready and available channels, of ner- 
vous energy from a reservoir that has been stored up 
too full. It occurs when we have prepared our minds 
for something big and momentous, and there follows 
something small and inconsiderable. Thus we see an 
acrobat run down a spring-board and do a somer- 
sault over the backs of four horses. It takes some en- 
ergy to perceive that. A clown follows him with the 
same earnest gait and gesture, and we gather energy 
to perceive it again. The clown stops to flick a bit 

175 


176 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


of dust off the flank of the nigh horse, and all that 
energy of ours, made suddenly superfluous, floods forth 
into the nearest available nerve-channels, which happen 
to innervate these muscles of voice and respiration and 
facial grimace. 

There is no exaggerating the eminence in our his- 
tory of these few clear pages of Herbert Spencer. They 
seemed really for the first time to explain how laughter 
“ bursts out, and in what manner it all at once takes 
possession of our sides, of our mouth, our veins, our 
look, our eyes. . . .” They authenticated the asser- 
tion of Jean Paul that the laughable as an objective 
thing is “the infinitely little,” and they supplied the 
basic idea for the most thoroughly elaborated treatise 
on humor and the comic that we have — that of Theodor 
Lipps. 

What Lipps did was to formulate a psychology to 
correspond with Spencer’s physiology of laughter. 
Spencer had explained why we laugh when we per- 
ceive something comic, and Lipps offered upon the 
same hypothesis to explain why we feel happy. He 
repeated in other language Spencer’s definition of the 
comic in itself as a “descending incongruity’ 1 — an in- 
congruity in perceiving which our attention passes from 
great things to small. And he fortified this definition 
by analyzing several examples of the comic — his favor- 
ite, for some reason, being that of a tiny house stand- 
ing near to a great palace and accurately imitating its 
form, or such a house occurring in a whole row of pal- 
aces. We are comically affected by this contrast, he 


THE MECHANICAL THEORY 


177 


observed, but by the contrast between a row of pal- 
aces and a church or a theatre, although it is equally 
pronounced, we are not so affected. And if we see a 
row of little houses and then one great palace, our 
emotion is wonder and astonishment rather than comic 
amusement. Thus a “ something little” forms always 
one side of the comic contrast, and it is always the 
second side, the goal and not the starting-point of our 
thought or perceptive activity. To ward off super- 
ficial objections, Lipps further characterized this psy- 
chologically little thing as that which is “for us rela- 
tively meaningless,” which “possesses little weight,” 
“makes less impression.” “A relative nothing,” he 
calls it, and thus comes into verbal accord with the 
statement of Kant, as well as those of Spencer and 
Jean Paul. 

Before endeavoring to show why such a contrast 
should produce comic feeling, Lipps is concerned to 
determine just what the essence of this feeling is. And 
he begins by throwing out all previous attempts to say 
what it is, on the ground that they do not recognize 
its uniqueness. They all try to identify the comic 
with some other emotion, and Lipps truly and repeat- 
edly asserts that “the feeling of the comic is a feeling 
of the comic and nothing else.” It is not always even 
a pleasant feeling, according to him, but may assume 
now more of the character of pleasure and now more 
of pain. But whether pleasurable or painful the 
ground-color of it is always a kind of merriment (. Heiter - 
keif). For in spite of the customs of speech, says 


178 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


Lipps, there is not only a merry pleasure, but also a 
merry pain. And this merriment — or gaiety, or fri- 
volity, as we might have to call it in English — is a feel- 
ing appropriate to what is small and of light import. 
“ The feeling of seriousness [des Ernstes] is a feeling of 
greatness or the great, it is a feeling of the strong, the 
very moving or weighty, the broad, the deep. The feel- 
ing of merriment in the aforementioned neutral sense 
[neutral, that is, in relation to pleasure and pain] is a 
feeling of smallness or the small; it is a feeling of the 
superficial, the light, the playing.” This feeling, says 
Lipps, affords “the common moment” in all experi- 
ences of the comic. 

In order to understand the origin of these two feel- 
ings, we must realize that it requires energy to make 
out of anything that affects our nervous system an 
object of conscious attention. It is as though our con- 
scious life were but the upper level of a reservoir of 
psychic, or at least cerebral, processes. To raise the 
waves of any of these processes high enough to bring 
them into consciousness is an actual mechanical effort, 
and the supply of psychic force required for this effort 
is greater according to the weight, or meaningfulness, 
or emotional importance of the given process. It is 
the relation of the supply of this psychic force we have 
prepared, to the demand that an object of attention 
actually makes upon us, which gives rise to these op- 
posite feelings of serious and gay. If a great object 
comes after little preparation, a sudden psychic labor 
is required of us, and we feel extremely grave; but if 


THE MECHANICAL THEORY 


179 


a little object comes after we have prepared for a 
great one, then our labor is more than done, and we 
feel like celebrating a holiday. And this may happen, 
even though we wanted the greater thing, and are 
somewhat pained at the loss. The qualitative contrast 
pains us, but quantitatively we are still the winners, 
for we have on hand an extra supply of “ psychic force,” 
and so even when our laugh is bitter, it is gay. 

We can best resist the charm of this too neatly me- 
chanical theory by recalling it to our mind upon some 
occasion when we are put into a fit of lasting hilarity 
by an incident so richly comic that we can neither 
depart from it nor regain any composure of our bodies 
while it survives. At such times it can only appear 
quixotic to attempt to separate comic laughter from 
other seizures of passion, which have their appropriate 
stimulus and their hereditary mode of behavior. But 
even if comic laughter were always merely a quick giggle 
of relief, such as might carry off a bit of energy out of 
the cerebrum, it could be demonstrated that its causes 
are too general to be defined as descending incongrui- 
ties, or as merely quantitative disappointments. It 
has been demonstrated, in fact, by one of Lipps’s critics, 
with the example of a man’s laughter who thinks he 
hears a cat in the closet, and when he opens the door 
discovers his aunt. Lipps was compelled to acknowl- 
edge that an aunt is both larger and of greater “psy- 
chic weight” than a cat, and he avoided the difficulty 
by saying that “the comic resides in one’s expecting 
for the aunt a worthy situation and finding an un- 


180 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


worthy.” But if we are going to be mechanical, we 
cannot jump aside in this way from the real sequence 
of events. The man had “ prepared his psychic energy” 
for raising into consciousness a cat. What he raised 
into consciousness was his aunt in an unworthy situa- 
tion — a weightier thing from every point of view. I 
suppose there is a joy for all healthy nephews in laying 
bare an aunt who has been smooching around the 
closet — a joy not untinctured with poetic humor — 
but I think it must be conceded that this humor is 
enriched by the simultaneous collapse of a more trivial 
expectation. Perhaps it would simplify the problem of 
weights and measures if the man were to find a cow in 
the closet. And yet I suppose it might be possible to 
prove that a cat has some closetarious importance, a 
kind of abditory or lurk-hole dignity at least, that 
makes him in that situation the heavier of the two. 

It is not easy to disestablish a theory which rests 
upon so indeterminate a fact as “psychic weight.” I 
believe, however, that the reader who can find humor 
in a small house occurring in a long row of palaces, will 
find humor in a large baby occurring in a long row of 
small ones. And he will have the same difficulty find- 
ing humor in a small baby that he does in a large house . 
The reason is that the smallness of babies, like the 
largeness of houses, does not so easily pass the range of 
our appetites. A tiny house is no house from the 
standpoint of our disposition toward houses, and a 
baby cannot be very much enlarged without ceasing 
to be a baby and becoming a preposterous object. 


THE MECHANICAL THEORY 181 

That is why these opposite quantities are the ones more 
easily made comic. 

If quantitative disappointments as such were the 
cause of our laughter, we should giggle a little at very 
slight ones, and roar louder and louder as they grow 
more extreme. But since playful annoyments are the 
cause of our laughter, it is natural that we should not 
even begin to laugh at the quantitative ones, until they 
grow extreme enough to rob us of the possibility of 
serious adjustment. It is not possible for one who ex- 
pected a clown to jump over four horses to adjust his 
preperceptions to the minute act of attention to a grain 
of dust upon one of the horses’ flanks. That is too 
little . But suppose the clown stands there meticulously 
dusting invisible grains from that flank, until through 
and by means of the process of comic laughter we have 
adjusted ourselves to it, and then suddenly draws back 
and gives the horse a terrible resounding whack — we 
shall laugh again and with the same comic delight, for 
that is too much. 

I remember an acrobatic juggler who, after enter- 
taining his audience for a time in the usual fashion, 
came down toward the front of the stage in argument 
with an accomplice in the gallery, who objected to his 
performance. The argument became so hot that the 
accomplice began to throw apples at the acrobat, and 
he, instead of dodging them energetically with his whole 
body, placed himself exactly in the way of them, duck- 
ing his head at the last moment and catching them in 
his hands behind his back. He thus disappointed us 


182 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


of the extravagant pleasure of seeing his head cracked 
with an apple, but presented to us in the same mo- 
ment a rare exhibition of nimble dexterity. Our laugh- 
ter was comic and uproarious. He repeated this trick 
until he could observe that our disappointment was no 
longer genuine, because we were now expecting the 
nimble dodge instead of the disaster. Then without 
the least change of method or expression, he permitted 
an apple to smash to pieces upon his bald crown. 
At this we laughed again freshly and with comic up- 
roar. For we had got exactly the satisfaction that we 
originally desired, -and got it in the form of a disap- 
pointment. This incident seemed to me useful as a 
disproof of the derision theory, for it showed that hu- 
morous laughter can arise when people are unexpectedly 
deprived of derision and presented with admiration, as 
well as when they are deprived of admiration and pre- 
sented with derision. But it seemed still more useful as 
disproving, in the only way that so flexible an idea 
could be disproven, the assertion of Lipps and Spencer 
that we laugh only when we arrive at the psychically 
small after expecting the psychically great, for here 
the thing expected and the thing arrived at were accu- 
rately interchanged, and our laughter was of equal vol- 
ume in the two cases. 

A certain feeling of ease or gaiety doubtless ensues 
when strenuous mental preparations have been made 
to perceive something which is trivial when it arrives. 
And this feeling colors the comic emotion, giving a 
character of levity to such humor as is merely absurd 


THE MECHANICAL THEORY 


183 


and meaningless, or consists in offering preposterously 
little things to our attention. When a clownish acro- 
bat poises himself and draws breath for an enormous 
leap, and then suddenly turns and saunters off the 
stage, there is a kind of easing joy mixed in the comedy 
of our laughter. It is a different mixture from that 
which arises if he stumbles and bumps his nose against 
some solid object on the way out. But to make that 
feeling of ease or levity the definitive essence of all 
comic experience is to commit exactly the error that 
Lipps so scornfully attributes to his predecessors. It is 
to define the comic feeling by saying that it is some- 
thing else. And Lipps could have demolished his own 
theory in the same words with which he demolished 
theirs. “The feeling of the comic is a feeling of the 
comic und weiter nichts!” That sentence contains his 
real contribution to the science of humor. 


CHAPTER VII 
LAUGHTER AS LIBERTY 

While those philosophers, impressed chiefly by the 
laughter of disappointment, were developing this dis- 
tinguished system of mechanics to explain it, another 
series of philosophers, impressed also by the laughter 
of satisfaction, had hit upon an equally distinguished 
and almost as mechanical explanation. Laughter, they 
said, is the result of a release of the nervous system 
from some form of tension or constraint. It is a let-go, 
a playing free of the whole apparatus upon the sudden 
removal of a purpose or an obstacle. 

An association of laughter with the idea of liberty 
first appeared in Lord Shaftesbury’s famous essay on 
“The Freedom of Wit and Humor” in 1711. 

“The natural free spirits of ingenious men,” he said, “if im- 
prisoned or controlled, will find out other ways of motion to 
relieve themselves in their constraint; and whether it be in bur- 
lesque, mimicry, or buffoonery, they will be glad at any rate to 
vent themselves, and be revenged on their constrainers. . . . 
*Tis the persecuting spirit has raised the bantering one.” 

The constraint implied here was external, and for 
the most part legal and political, but this same idea 
carried inward, and applied to the workings of our 
own minds, became one of the most famous theories 

184 


LAUGHTER AS LIBERTY 185 

of comic laughter. It was Alexander Bain, I believe, 
who first so applied it. 

“ The Comic, in fact, starts from the Serious,” he said. “ The 
dignified, solemn, and stately attributes of things require in us 
a certain posture of rigid constraint; and if we are suddenly 
relieved from this posture, the rebound of hilarity ensues, as in 
the case of children set free from school. ... It is always a 
gratifying deliverence to pass from the severe to the easy side 
of affairs; and the comic conjunction is one form of this transi- 
tion.” 

The idea suggested here has found increasing favor 
in modern times, and may be discovered along with the 
dying echoes of Hobbes’s theory in almost any text-book 
of psychology. It was enriched by Charles Renouvier, 
who added to the moral and emotional deliverance im- 
plied in Bain’s language, the idea of a deliverance from 
the constraints of rationality— an idea already hinted 
at by Schopenhauer. I quote from “La Nouvelle 
Monadologie”: 

“ One sometimes sees the face of him who laughs marked with 
incertitude, with astonishment. He seems for a moment to 
make an effort of attention, in order to find a reasonable meaning 
in the thought that one offers him. But in presence of the im- 
possibility of sensible interpretation and recognizing that the 
unreason is voluntary, he feels that it is not the moment to make 
sense, and releases himself. This release of the reason translates 
itself physiologically by the laugh. Mentally it is a kind of 
play. . . . 

The reasonable animal, the same as the risible animal (so 
described by the scholastic doctors) in playing the fool, escapes 


186 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


for a time from the constraints of the rational faculty, and ex- 
periences a joy of deliverance in going outside of its law and 
making nonsense.” 

This view of comic laughter found a valiant cham- 
pion in the year 1893, when A. Penjon published his 
brilliant dogmatic essay on “Laughter and Liberty.” 
And in the year 1894 it received a more judicious in- 
dorsement in John Dewey’s articles on “The Theory 
of Emotion.” Dewey was not directly concerned with 
the problem of humor, but by way of illustrating his 
discussion of emotion and emotional expression in gen- 
eral, he spoke at some length about laughter, which he 
described as a “ sudden relaxation of strain.” It marks 
the end, he said, of a period of suspense or expectancy, 
“the attainment of a unity.” We constrain our ner- 
vous energy in much the same way that we hold our 
breath during a period of expectancy, and in attain- 
ment we release it, and laughter is the effect of that 
release. Humor and all the forms of the comic offer 
“ simply more complex and intellectually loaded differ- 
entiations of this general principle.” 

Dewey was probably not aware of Penjon’s attempt 
to apply this principle to those more complex differ- 
entiations. If he had been, he might have felt some 
doubt of its validity. For Penjon, in his enthusiasm 
for the idea that laughter is nothing but “ the end of a 
constraint” — or as he names it again more picturesquely 
“ liberty visible ” — arrives at some assertions that would 
do violence to Dewey’s very guiding sense of real 
fact. Even gibes and mockery confess themselves to 


LAUGHTER AS LIBERTY 


187 


be a special kind of spiritual freedom in the course of his 
essay, and the smile with which one greets a friend is 
described as “the natural mark of an increased liberty.” 
We cannot but admire the skill and energy with which 
M. Penjon rides his epigram, but we do not receive a 
sense of arriving at any assured destination. We ob- 
serve that a number of brilliant starts are made and 
that at least one famous and fertile idea was launched 
by him — the idea that comic speech and behavior is 
“the sudden eruption of a spontaneity,” and that 
“nature,” which is “in a large sense synonymous with 
liberty,” is what breaks through the constraints of 
civilization in jokes and humorous laughter. It is this 
idea that now occupies so much attention in the doc- 
trines of Sigmund Freud. 

That psychology was tending in this direction before 
Freud’s theories became widely known, however, may 
be seen in several articles and text-books. Among 
these a plea for the general acceptance of Penjon’s 
theory, which appeared in the American Journal of 
Psychology for October, 1907, is interesting because it 
reveals a new tone of voice in which the problem of 
humorous laughter was beginning to be discussed. 

Humor “ stands guard at the dividing line between free and 
mechanized mind, to check mechanization and to preserve and 
fan the sparks of genius. . . . The humor stimulus gives 
glimpses of the world of uncertainties, of spontaneities, and of 
life, and in so doing creates the sense of freedom of which the 
sense of humor is the obverse side. . . . Perhaps its largest 
function is to detach us from our world of good and evil, of loss 


188 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


and gain, and enable us to see it in proper perspective. It frees 
us from vanity, on the one hand, and from pessimism on the 
other by keeping us larger than what we do, and greater than 
what can happen to us.” 

It is evident in these paragraphs that some of 
Hegel’s wisdom was coming back into this modern 
theory, and that humorous laughter, from being a 
mere mechanical by-accident or purely negative con- 
dition of release, was beginning again to resemble wis- 
dom and nobility of life itself. We must confess, how- 
ever, that liberty is a purely negative condition, and 
if taken in any defined scientific sense, does not per- 
mit all these positive good things to be deduced from 
it. The author says at one point in his essay that “ the 
uniqueness of the humor tone is the crux of the matter,” 
and that is true, but it is contradictory to everything 
else that he says. For liberty, a release from tension, 
a removal of constraint, an absence of mechanization 
— however we describe it — does not necessarily possess 
this unique tone. We do frequently laugh at the end 
of a period of tension, and if the end comes in certain 
ways, we laugh humorously, but there are many other 
things which w^e do at the end of such a period. We 
move our chairs, get up and walk about, stretch, sigh, 
swear, pray, cough, or say “Whew !” or say “Well! 
Well!” or “Bless my soul!” Dewey himself points 
out that we release our breath after a period of tension, 
but he does not offer that as an explanation of breath- 
ing, and there is little better reason why laughter, and 
above all humorous laughter with its unique quality 


LAUGHTER AS LIBERTY 


189 


of feeling, should receive so negative an explanation. 
Laughter is not a concise and finely determined form 
of behavior, perhaps, but it is a sufficiently definite 
semivoluntary act. It is a part of what we do, and 
not merely something that happens when we have 
ceased to do anything. 

When Dewey says that the smile of an infant is an 
expression of assent, he has himself profoundly con- 
tradicted his explanation of laughter as a kind of me- 
chanical accident. He has placed it where so universal, 
frequent, and emotional an activity would seem inevi- 
tably to belong, among the positive functions or in- 
stincts of man, whose ultimate explanation is their 
utility in life and evolution. Likewise when Penjon 
is compelled by his theory to declare that in meeting 
a friend we experience an increase of liberty, he has 
tacitly acknowledged the failure of his theory. For it 
was not liberty as a vague word of eulogy for all the 
positive good things of life, but liberty as “ la fin d’une 
contrainte,” that had given meaning and scientific co- 
gency to his epigram. Laughter is liberty — yes, it is 
one of the things that we are most likely to do when we 
are set free. But it is not what we always do; some- 
times we shout. And it is a thing that we do upon 
other occasions also; we laugh at our chains. There- 
fore, however happily they may be associated together, 
and however much a feeling of liberty may sometimes 
accelerate our laughter and flavor the enjoyment of a 
joke, liberty is not laughter and cannot fundamentally 
explain its existence. 


CHAPTER VIII 
FREUD’S CONTRIBUTION 

The scientific world is generally aware that Sigmund 
Freud, in addition to his other momentous gifts to our 
self-knowledge, has made an important contribution 
to the understanding of wit and humor. But just 
what that contribution is, nobody seems to know. 
And there are two good reasons for this. One is that 
Freud himself has not a clear conception of it, and 
the other is that he has chosen a method of exposition 
which would leave his reader in a state of refined doubt 
and madness, even were his own thoughts the clear- 
est in the world. His method is to coax and allure 
us with original and apparently fertile ideas continually 
up to the verge of some point or conclusion, only to 
dodge away at the last moment, intimating that the 
matter must remain in suspense until “later on,” and 
then never explicitly to mention it again. There is 
no reader in existence who could hold all these sus- 
pended matters in memory throughout the labor that 
follows, and we may simply put it down as one more 
evidence of the wide gulf between theoretic and active 
knowledge, that one of the greatest students of the 
human mind should write a book that no human mind 
can satisfactorily read. With that much by way of 
“discharging the affect,” we may be able to estimate 

190 


FREUD’S CONTRIBUTION 191 

Freud’s ideas justly, and give them a due place in our 
history. 

These ideas really belong to the theory of laughter 
as liberty, or a release of the mind and nervous system 
from constraint. Freud brought the support and illu- 
mination of his hypothesis of the Unconscious to that 
theory, confirming in a surprising way the remarks of 
Bain and Renouvier and John Dewey, and building 
up a solid platform of fact under Penjon’s acrobatic 
speculations. But owing to his scientific environment, 
as it seems, rather than to any thorough consideration 
and choice, he accepted the mechanical theory of Lipps 
and Spencer as an established science of laughter, and 
unsuccessfully endeavored to engraft his thoughts upon 
that theory. 

Freud’s book is primarily an investigation of wit, 
or what we have called intellectual jokes, and he 
traces these jokes to their origin in the world-play and 
thought-play of children, an activity which he thinks 
is not humorous, but merely a happy and wanton 
exercise of the mental faculties. It is a direct enjoy- 
ment of nonsense, such as Renouvier had declared that 
the play of a “rational animal” would be. As the 
child grows up he is compelled by the social standards 
of rationality, and what we call “good sense,” to aban- 
don these forms of amusement, but the impulse to 
indulge them remains alive in his bosom, and he finds 
in maturity a very astute way of satisfying it. He 
seeks out forms of speech which are from one point of 
view nonsense, but which from another point of view 


192 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


mean something. He thus gratifies his love of non- 
sense, without too much offending his reason and 
critical judgment. And that is the simplest kind of 
wit, which Freud designates with the word Scherz , and 
which his English translator has called the “jest.” In 
a jest as so defined we do not derive any pleasure from 
the meaning of what is said; our pleasure lies in its 
meaninglessness, and the meaning is there only “to 
guard this pleasure against suppression by our reason.” 

Freud recalls, as an example of this rudimentary 
kind of playfulness, the remark of a professor who 
taught at the University of Gottingen in the sixteenth 
century. 

“ Wishing to enroll a student named Warr in his class, he asked 
him his age, and upon receiving the reply that the student 
was thirty years of age, he exclaimed: 'Aha, so I have the honor 
of seeing the Thirty Years’ War I’” 

There is a comic quality in this remark, and yet it is 
not to be described as “wit,” according to Freud, be- 
cause, although it makes sense, the sense has no value. 
If the man’s name had been Johnson, there would have 
been no purpose in saying “ I have the honor of seeing 
a Thirty year Johnson.” Such a statement would just 
barely have made sense — and so also of this statement. 
But that is all that is required of the formal aspect of a 
jest. Its value is its nonsense — the sheer folly, in this 
case, of announcing in the midst of a dignified academic 
performance “I see the Thirty Years’ War!” 

In order to place it in the higher species of humor, 


FREUD'S CONTRIBUTION 


193 


which Freud calls “wit,” the sense of a jest as well as 
the nonsense must have value. And in such cases our 
infantile pleasure in the nonsense serves to enhance and 
magnify the value of the sense. It makes us think 
more of it than we otherwise should, although still it is 
not the sense, but the nonsense— the release of our mind 
from the constraints of reason — that produces witty 
pleasure, and gives the character of humor to these 
intellectual jokes. 

As an example of wit Freud is very fond of recalling 
the remark of Heine’s character Hirsch-Hyacinth that 
“I sat next to Solomon Rothschild, who treated me just 
as if I were an equal, quite famillionaire.” The sense 
that Freud finds in this nonsense is the rather bitter 
observation that Rothschild “ treated him in a familiar 
way, that is, as far as this can be done by a million- 
aire.” Thus “the jest,” or nonsense made tolerable 
to reason, rises to the dignity of “wit,” or nonsense 
lending its glamour and protection to a sensible state- 
ment. 

But nonsense has a still greater career to fulfil, be- 
fore it ever becomes the cause of hilarious laughter. It 
has to give release to other and stronger repressed ten- 
dencies of our nature than the mere tendency to play — 
namely, the hostile or aggressive tendency, and the 
sexual or “obscene” tendency. When the sense which 
lurks behind the nonsense of a jest is a conscious ex- 
pression of one or the other of these great unconscious 
tendencies, “ from which nothing that is formed in psy- 
chic life can escape for any length of time,” then it has 


194 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


come into its full maturity as a provoker of laughter, 
and assumed an altogether new importance in the 
mechanism of our minds. Freud calls these jests which 
release from the unconscious a major impulse of our 
nature “ tendency wit,” as opposed to that “ harm- 
less wit” which merely sets free the play-impulse, 
and at which he says we never laugh very uproari- 
ously. 

In tendency wit there is still from one point of view 
a nonsense in what is said, and that is the more obvious 
point of view. And our childish pleasure in this non- 
sense makes the words acceptable and easy to express, 
although in reality they are merely a disguise for cer- 
tain intimate and emotional kinds of sense , which with- 
out such a disguise we could not, or would not dare to 
express at all. We might find it difficult, for instance, 
to acknowledge, or even to know, that there exists in 
our bodies a rather indiscriminate yearning to commit 
adultery. But if we were earnestly advising some 
young man to take a wife, and he should earnestly 
reply "Whose?” that would give us a pleasure out of 
all proportion to the proper value of such nonsense. 
It would not only release us from the temporary con- 
straints of intellectual purpose, but it would set aside 
the whole structure of restriction upon which our social 
culture is founded, and inaugurate a moment at least 
of really barbaric and uproarious liberty. Tendency 
wit might be defined then, according to Freud, as a 
kind of nonsense, pleasurable in itself, but so con- 
structed as to furnish a disguise under which a man 


FREUD’S CONTRIBUTION 195 

hearing it can bear to admit into his own society his 
own suppressed impulses. 

For those who are a little shocked, either in their 
taste or their sense of reality, by Freud’s assertion that 
the impulses released in this way from the unconscious 
are only two — the aggressive and the sexual — it will 
be interesting to know that Freud even declares that 
these two “may be united under one view-point” — 
and that of course the view-point of sex. He does not 
unite them, however, but on the contrary expands and 
generalizes the one called “aggressive,” until it includes 
much that is remote from the real implication of the 
word. It includes that form of satire which is an at- 
tack upon the unnatural and overpretentious institu- 
tions of human culture; it includes jokes told upon one- 
self, and the jokes which Jewish people delight in at 
the expense of their own race; and it even includes, as 
a separate class, jokes which attack neither a person 
nor an institution, but “the very certainty of our 
knowledge,” and may be called “sceptical jokes.” 

It is characteristic of that tendency toward amateur 
and irresponsible generalization which can be detected 
elsewhere in Freud’s writing, that he should erect an 
entirely distinct kind and class of wit called “scepti- 
cal,” for no better reason than that he has thought of a 
good story which awakens in him a pleasurable specu- 
lation. If he had thought a little longer he could have 
erected many other classes of tendency wit besides the 
hostile and the sexual — as many as there are impulses 


196 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


unsatisfied in man. Let us hear the story, however. 
It is about two Jews who met in a railway-station: 

“ Where are you going ?” said one. 

“To Cracow,” said the other. 

“What a liar you are!” said the first. “You want 
me to believe you’re going to Lemburg, and that’s why 
you say you’re going to Cracow. But I know very well 
you’re going to Cracow!” 

The remoteness of our pleasure in this story from a 
mood of hostile or obscene aggression against the 
existence of truth may justify us in taking the rest of 
Freud’s classification somewhat lightly. We may in- 
dulge a little scepticism of our own at his expense. 
When he boldly asserts — as he quite often does — that 
all of a large number of things may be “united under 
the view-point” of sex, he may be employing a little 
Jewish bravado not unlike that of the man who was 
going to Cracow. He knows very well that we will 
not believe they can all be united under the view-point 
of sex, but he is wilful enough to say they all can, in 
order to get us to believe that most of them can. 

This statement about the predominance of sex in our 
unconscious natures is decidedly a minor point in 
Freud’s book, however, and the manner in which it has 
been grabbed out and exploited as the essence of his 
book tends rather to confirm its truth. The essence 
of his book, as a contribution of something new to the 
science of humor, is its demonstration that witticisms, 
whatever their original and more simple nature may be, 
are peculiarly adapted for releasing suppressed motives 
from the unconscious, and they are frequently so em- 


; 


FREUD’S CONTRIBUTION 


197 


ployed. Freud was led to realize this fact by the pe- 
culiar similarity that he observed between wit and 
dreams. 

A dream when it is interpreted, he says, often seems 
like a poor attempt at a joke. It shows the same ten- 
dency to express two or more things by one, to express 
a thing by its opposite, by something similar to it, by 
using ambiguous words, or words that have both a lit- 
eral and a figurative meaning, by twisting words, or 
making up new ones, or changing their order in a sen- 
tence. Indeed a dream has all the attributes of a joke 
except its humor. It seems to be something like a joke 
turned inside out. And Freud tries to explain this by 
saying that a dream disguises our forbidden thoughts 
in order to keep them out of consciousness, while a joke 
disguises them in order to let them in. In the one case 
we are trying to avoid the pain of thinking about some- 
thing that we dread more than we desire it; in the other 
we are trying to secure the pleasure of something that 
we desire more than we dread it. Naturally, therefore, 
dreams are colorless and pointless; their function is 
negative; their function is not to make seme. The func- 
tion of witticisms is to make seme, and, in tendency wit 
at least, to make sense of a very pleasurable kind. In 
that way Freud explains both the similarity and the 
difference between wit and dreams, and so seeks to 
prove and complete his theory of the relation of wit to 
the unconscious. 

I believe that any one who has read away at Freud’s 
book with patient endurance will agree that this is a 


198 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


true and not incomplete account of his essential explana- 
tion of wit. And yet the reader who takes up his book 
for the first time will be surprised to find that at no 
point does he appear to be discussing the ideas here 
described, or attempting to prove them. He is always 
apparently occupied with the thesis that in every ex- 
ample of wit, and also in comic perceptions, and in 
emotional humor, there is a sudden “economy of psy- 
chic expenditure,” and that this is the source of our 
pleasure, and the cause of our laugh. For that is the 
idea which he derived from his friend Theodor Lipps, 
and which Lipps derived from Herbert Spencer. 

It is apparent in the language that Freud himself 
uses when he is discussing tendency wit, and the rela- 
tion of wit to dreams, and in many other places, that 
his own natural conception of the source of our pleasure 
is “the gratification of tendencies.” 

“ The pleasure in tendency wit,” he says, “results from the 
fact that a tendency whose gratification would otherwise remain 
unfulfilled is actually gratified. That such gratification is a 
source of pleasure is self-evident without further discussion.” 

Here he speaks a language about pleasure which is 
intelligible and natural to the layman, and which also 
accords with the best technical attempts to deal with 
this difficult problem. He speaks the same language 
again in one of his foot-notes, where he makes a sugges- 
tion — which I think is wholly erroneous — about the 
origin of the laugh. 

“According to the best of my knowledge the grimaces and con- 
tortions of the corners of the mouth that characterize laughter 
appear first in the satisfied and satiated nursling when he drowsily 


FREUD’S CONTRIBUTION 


199 


quits the breasts. There it is a correct motion of expression 
since it bespeaks the determination to take no more nourishment, 
an ‘enough,’ so to speak, or rather a ‘more than enough.’ This 
primal sense of pleasurable satiation may have furnished the 
smile, which ever remains the basic phenomenon of laughter.” 

These statements about our pleasure in “the grati- 
fication of a tendency” and about a “sense of pleasur- 
able satiation,” are not only in accord with common 
sense and good science, but they are also in accord with 
the original tenor of Freud’s psychology, which dealt 
with a “libido” and its adventures in gratification and 
denial, as the source of all psychic weal or woe. They 
seem, therefore, to justify us in regarding the too labored 
idea of an “economy of psychic expenditure,” as not 
only unessential to his theory, but also in some degree 
alien and opposed to it. 

Since we are writing a history, however, as well as 
a criticism, we must proceed to show how Freud brings 
his theory of witty pleasure as a gratification of repressed 
tendencies, into accord with the theory that it is a re- 
sult of psychic energy suddenly made superfluous, or as 
he says economized. He does it in a different way for 
each of the four kinds, or stages, of wit which he has 
described. 

(1) That the pleasure of a child’s play with words 
arises from a kind of psychic economy, he does not 
really explain at all, but simply asserts it in the follow- 
ing words: 

“Play — we shall retain this name — appears in children while 
they are learning how to use words and connect thoughts; this 
playing is probably the result of an impulse which urges the 


200 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 

child to exercise its capacities (Groos). During this process it 
experiences pleasurable effects which originate from the repeti- 
tion of similarities, the rediscovery of the familiar, sound-asso- 
ciations, etc., which may be explained as an unexpected economy 
of psychic expenditure. Therefore it surprises no one that these 
resulting pleasures urge the child to practice playing and impel it 
to continue without regard for the meaning of words or the con- 
nections between sentences. Playing with words and thoughts, 
motivated by certain pleasures in economy, would thus be the 
first step to wit.” 

(2) The jest, we remember, is merely a trick of so 
arranging this childish play-nonsense that it will also 
make sense, and thus guarding these original pleasure- 
sources against the censorship of reason. Granted that 
play-pleasure is mere economy, therefore, it needs no 
proof that the pleasure of a jest is of the same sort, 
and no proof is offered. 

(3) With wit, however, even of the “harmless” kind, 
a very elaborate proof is offered. Indeed almost the 
first half of Freud’s book is an attempt, by analyzing a 
great series of more or less familiar witticisms, to show 
that in them all some sort of “condensation” occurs, 
so that a given amount of verbal or conceptual effort 
conveys more than its usual amount of meaning. “A 
compressing or — to be more exact — an economizing 
tendency controls all these technics.” 

Freud’s translator offers as an example of this ten- 
dency the following native witticism: 

“A Tale of Two American Generations 
Gold Mine 
Gold Spoon 
Gold Cure” 


FREUD’S CONTRIBUTION 


201 


It is an example which disproves Freud’s assertion, 
so far as I am concerned, for my actual expenditure of 
psychic force in digging out the meaning condensed in 
this nonsense was greater than would have been re- 
quired by a direct and sensible statement, and yet I 
was not unable to enjoy its wit. In many of Freud’s 
own examples he is to me equally unconvincing, and 
his whole labor here seems loose and inconsequential, 
largely because he shifts vaguely back and forth be- 
tween his original purpose — to show that the technique 
of wit is the same as that of dreams — and this adventi- 
tious one — to show that it is “all a matter of economy.” 

(4) To prove that economy is the source of our 
pleasure in “ tendency wit” would seem especially 
difficult, because the very definition of this wit as ful- 
filling a tendency implies that we enjoy it because of 
that fulfilment. But here Freud is very ingenious. 
He tells us that our pleasure does not arise out of the 
fulfilment of the tendency, but out of the fact that 
the energy which had been employed in preventing its 
fulfilment is released. “We observe,” he says, “that 
the economy of psychic expenditure in suppressions 
and inhibitions seems to be the secret of the pleasur- 
able effect of tendency wit.” 

If we set this observation over against the one 
quoted previously that “the pleasure in tendency wit 
results from the fact that a tendency whose gratifica- 
tion would otherwise remain unfulfilled is gratified,” 
we have at once a sample of the confusion in Freud’s 
book and an indication of the source of it. He is try- 
ing to make a theory of laughter as the liberation of 


202 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


impulse fit into the forms of the theory that laughter 
is an overflow of energy. 

In his discussion of what he calls humor Freud sim- 
ply reproduces one of the clear ideas of his predecessor. 
It will be remembered that in Lipps’s theory the 
“small” thing at which we laugh is often small only 
in the sense of being “less impressive” than the one 
for which we had prepared ourselves. It is a thing of 
less emotional importance. And to laughable things of 
this kind Freud gives the name of “ humor.” The plea- 
sure in humor, he says, arises from an “economy of 
expenditure in feeling.” It may be the feeling of sym- 
pathy, of anger, pain, compassion, or indeed any emo- 
tion whatever, with which we might be prepared to 
greet an experience. But when the experience arrives, 
if we discover that this prepared feeling was excessive 
or uncalled for, then our souls are relieved at the sudden 
saving of passion, and laugh with that peculiar parsi- 
monious pleasure which Freud attributes to them. 
The fact that these souls also laugh hilariously at the 
forms of w T it which permit the sudden expenditure of 
these same passions does not trouble the author, and 
need not trouble the reader either, if he will remember 
that all this is simply a rescript of Lipps’s and Spencer’s 
idea of the “descending incongruity,” and that Freud’s 
real contribution to the science of humor has nothing 
whatever to do with it. 

Freud invented the hypothesis of the unconscious, 
and of the repression of primitive and infantile motives 


FREUD’S CONTRIBUTION 


203 


into the unconscious, and he discovered that dreams 
and neurotic and psychotic symptoms, and many little 
accidents of speech and action in every-day life, are 
the result of an attempt of these motives to express 
themselves in spite of the force that represses them. 
In myth and poetry and the development of language 
he also discovered signs of these unconscious motives. 
And he discovered them in certain hilarious forms of 
wit, where they play so great a part that it will be 
impossible ever to explain wit, or to explain humorous 
laughter in general, without at some point employing 
Freud’s hypothesis of the unconscious. But Freud 
himself did not explain wit, nor humorous laughter, 
and it will only delay and hinder the explanation of 
them if the great respect we have for his genius leads 
us to think that he did. 

Freud’s long labor of pseudo-empirical proof that 
witticisms have the same technique as dreams is not 
important, for it is clear from his definition of them 
that dreams and witticisms will both employ any and 
every technique by which a given set of words or ideas 
can make formal nonsense, and yet imply or symbolize 
something intelligible. The important thing is his 
definition, his statement that dreams and tendency wit 
are practically the same thing, and that dreams lack 
pleasantness merely because they are employed to 
keep ideas out of consciousness instead of to bring them 
in. I think there is one other difference between 
dreams and the jokes which release an impulse from the 
unconscious — namely, that jokes, besides being pleas- 


204 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


ant, give rise to a comic emotion, and that dreams, even 
when they are interpreted and the forbidden idea thus 
brought into consciousness, do not give rise to such an 
emotion. And that raises, of course, the fundamental 
objection to Freud’s theory of wit. He does not at 
any point explain, or even apparently perceive, the 
existence of this quality of feeling. He says that the 
original pleasure which children have in nonsense is 
not a comic or humorous pleasure, and yet elsewhere 
he says that it is a pleasure derived from “ economy.” 
Why should this economy-pleasure be without humor 
when it is enjoyed in a simple manner by children, and 
yet acquire a humorous quality when it is come back 
to by adults, who only bring with them a slightly more 
complicated kind of economy? That is what Freud’s 
elaboration of Lipps’s theory fails altogether to explain. 

And if we drop away the Lippsian apparatus, and 
consider Freud’s theory in its own simplicity, there is 
still the same failure. He is compelled, in his search 
for the original simple experience from which witty 
values are derived, to postulate a pure “ pleasure in 
nonsense.” And nonsense, for one whose interest is 
engaged upon a pursuit of meaning, is just the same as 
nothing at all. It is intellectual nothing. Therefore 
Freud is not here in essential disagreement with Kant. 
But for Freud this nothing does not acquire a comic 
value until it is combined with something. Children 
are without humor, according to him, and nonsense is 
not “ funny” until it also makes sense. And yet why 
it is funny then, he never attempts to explain. 


FREUD’S CONTRIBUTION 


205 


He could not explain it upon the assumptions he 
has made, any more than he can explain why dreams 
are not funny when they are interpreted. But the 
whole difficulty is resolved at once if we acknowledge 
that children have a more lively though crude sense 
of humor than we have, and that their pleasure in 
nonsense h the pure evidence of this trait. As they 
become more serious, more critical, purposive, self- 
conscious, this play-instinct is less responsive, and in 
mature life positive meanings are brought in, not to 
“protect” the humorous pleasure against “the censor- 
ship of reason,” but to reinforce and flavor it to the 
adult taste with the satisfaction of a more serious in- 
terest. That, I think, is the truth which Freud gropes 
after in the confusion of these pages. His whole sys- 
tem of psychology is at fault in that it does not recog- 
nize the original variety of the instincts, nor explain the 
different qualities of emotion. It deals only with 
pleasure and pain. Naturally, the same failing makes 
inadequate his explanation of wit. 


CHAPTER IX 

THE DISCOVERY OF MERRY LAUGHTER 

We have seen that in the Dark Ages men were fa- 
miliar with the connection between laughter and states 
of joy or satisfaction. Lactantius even associates 
laughter more precisely with satisfactions of the social 
instinct, asserting that animals as well as men are en- 
dowed with this faculty and express their “mutual love 
and indulgence” with “a kind of smile.” It was only 
after the Revival of too much Learning that this ob- 
vious truth disappeared out of literature, and all the 
philosophers began to identify laughter with comic en- 
joyment. They all followed in the footsteps of Aris- 
totle, until Charles Darwin with his gift of pure obser- 
vation set out to make a science of the emotional ex- 
pressions of men and animals. He rediscovered the ob- 
vious truth that men laugh when they are happy, and 
laid a new basis for the understanding of this whole 
subject. 

“ Laughter,” said Darwin, “seems primarily to be the expres- 
sion of mere joy or happiness. We clearly see this in children 
at play, who are almost incessantly laughing. With young 
persons past childhood, when they are in high spirits, there is 
always much meaningless laughter. The laughter of the gods 
is described by Homer as ‘the exuberance of their celestial joy 
after their daily banquet.’ A man smiles — and smiling, as we 

206 


DISCOVERY OF MERRY LAUGHTER 207 


shall see, graduates into laughter — at meeting an old friend in 
the street, as he does at any trifling pleasure, such as smelling a 
sweet perfume. Laura Bridgman, from her blindness and deaf- 
ness, could not have acquired any expression through imitation, 
yet when a letter from a beloved friend was communicated to 
her by gesture-language, she ‘ laughed and clapped her hands, 
and the color mounted to her cheeks.’ On other occasions she 
has been seen to stamp for joy. Idiots and imbecile persons 
likewise afford good evidence that laughter or smiling primarily 
expresses mere happiness or joy.” 


Darwin does not, of course, fail to observe that there 
exists another kind of laughter — a laughter at the lu- 
dicrous — and he is contented with Hobbes’s account of 
it. But he rightly perceives this to be a secondary 
thing. Laughter is for him primarily, and in the most 
general sense, an expression of human pleasure and 
satisfaction. “ A graduated series,” he says, “ can be fol- 
lowed from violent to moderate laughter, to a broad 
smile, to a gentle smile, and to the expression of mere 
cheerfulness.” 

Now the prevailing way in which Darwin seeks to 
explain emotional expressions is this: he shows that 
these expressions are survivals or surviving remnants 
of complete acts which were useful to the species at 
some point in its earlier history. The attitude of in- 
dignation, for instance, is what remains of a prepara- 
tion for battle; the sneer is an uncovering of the canine 
tooth for action; the upraised eyebrows and wide open- 
ing of the mouth and eyes in fear are an effort “to see 
as quickly as possible all around us, and to hear dis- 


208 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


tinctly whatever sound may reach our ears.” In ways 
similar to this all the “emotional expressions” were ex- 
plained by Darwin. And his explanations have been 
authenticated, and raised almost to the height of cer- 
tainty, by our modern understanding of the relation 
between acts and emotions. For we see now that those 
acts or beginning of acts which he described, are the 
primary and essential thing, and that emotions are 
but the interior quality which belongs to them. We 
no longer say that the attitude of alertness and a 
preparation for flight “expresses the emotion” of fear. 
We say that fear is a feeling which attends this attitude 
and those preparations — a feeling which is perhaps 
more intense the more we inhibit them, or fail to carry 
them out into overt action. We say that anger is our 
feeling of the instinctive attitude of pugnacity. In 
this way we verify but reinterpret all of Darwin’s 
careful observations. 

Therefore it is very significant that when he arrived 
at laughter, Darwin was not able to apply his mode of 
explanation at all. He was at a complete loss to dis- 
cover any useful instinctive activity, which occurred 
at moments of special satisfaction, and would account 
for the innervation of all the various muscles employed 
in smiles and laughter. He simply asserted his belief 
in the possibility of such an explanation. 

“ Although we can hardly account for the shape of the mouth 
during laughter, which leads to winkles being formed beneath 
the eyes, nor for the peculiar reiterated sound of laughter, nor 
for the quivering of the jaws, nevertheless we may infer that all 


DISCOVERY OF MERRY LAUGHTER 209 


these effects are due to some common cause. For they are all 
characteristic and expressive of a pleased state of mind in various 
kinds of monkeys. ,, 

It was at this point that a true beginning for the 
solution of the problem of laughter remained to be 
found. We had to discover what instinct it is, whose 
functioning is colored with an emotion almost like 
happiness or pleasure itself, and whose characteristic 
expression is an agreeable diverse activity of the counte- 
nance and of the vocal organs. And to state the prob- 
lem in that way was almost to make the reply that it is 
the gregarious or social instinct, the instinct which finds 
its stimulus in mere companionship or friendly meeting, 
and its characteristic satisfaction in seeing the smiling 
laughter in the eyes of others and hearing them re- 
spond. Laughter differs from the other expressions 
in that it is not the mere suggestive relic of an act. It 
is an act — a fulfilment in its own proper degree of the 
social instinct. To exchange a smile is to do some- 
thing, and short of kissing or devouring one another, 
nothing more with these particular muscles can very 
well be done. But with that slight difference laughter 
is susceptible of the same explanation as the other 
forms of emotional expression. 

Darwin himself, it seems, was almost on the point of 
naming the social or gregarious instinct, and reach- 
ing this explanation of how laughter came to be em- 
ployed as an expression of satisfaction in general. 

“ We can see in a vague manner,” he said, “ how the utterance 
of sounds of some kind would naturally become associated with 


210 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


a pleasurable state of mind; for throughout a large part of the 
animal kingdom vocal or instrumental sounds are employed 
either as a call or as a charm by one sex for the other. They are 
also employed as the means for a joyful meeting between the 
parents and their offspring, and between the attached members 
of the same social community.” 

These words of the great biologist seem to put the 
origin of laughter in its true place, and we may well 
distrust any theory of humor — no matter how mechan- 
ical or neuro-dynamic or psycho-pathological it may be 
— which does not find itself in accord with them. 


CHAPTER X 

CONFLICT-MIXTURE THEORIES 

As the laughter of satisfaction and the laughter of 
disappointment have both had their champions in 
modern philosophy, so has the laughter that arises in 
a combination of satisfaction with disappointment. A 
great many philosophers, impressed by the doubleness 
of mature jokes, have tried to define humor in general 
as a “contrast,” or “conflict,” or “mixture” of desir- 
able with undesirable qualities. The first one to re- 
vive in our modern world this old opinion of Plato — 
the first, and I am inclined to add the best — was that 
physician to the king of France, L. Joubert, the author 
of the “Traite du ris.” Written in the century before 
Descartes, and yet conceived entirely in the spirit of 
physiological psychology, this little book deserves a 
place among the classics of the science. Doctor Jou- 
bert tells us, in the first place, that the faculty of comic 
laughter is not located in the brain, but “sits in the 
heart with the other passions,” and if our own theory 
is correct, that is the most sensible statement that the 
whole literature of the subject affords. Doctor Jou- 
bert is also wise enough to know — what most of those 
who followed him found it necessary to forget — that 
any true science of humor must carry with it the ex- 
planation of our pleasure in tickling; and he is clearly 

211 


212 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


aware of the inseparable connection between humor and 
that light way of taking things which we describe as 
play. 

The “Traite du ris” accepts, as we have already ob- 
served, an Aristotelian account of the ludicrous object. 
It is always an ugly or unseemly object. But our 
derisive feeling about this object, according to Doctor 
Joubert, instead of being altogether happy, is invariably 
mixed with pain, and this mixture is what causes the 
peculiar phenomenon called laughter. 

“ When an object at once pleasant with drollery and sad with 
ugliness presents itself the heart is stirred very quickly and un- 
evenly, because it wishes to make at the same time two contrary 
movements, the one of joy and the other of sorrow. Each one 
is short, through being suddenly interrupted by its opposite 
which obstructs the path : at the same time the dilation surpasses 
the contraction, as in the ridiculous there is always more pleasure 
than pain.” 

The doctor further assures us, upon the basis of cer- 
tain authentic anatomical investigations, that the hu- 
man heart, in distinction from that of the animal, is 
attached to the diaphragm, and thus it follows by a 
simple mechanical necessity that men shake their 
diaphragms when they perceive a ridiculous object, 
while animals do not. That they do the same thing 
when they are tickled is subject to a similar explana- 
tion, for tickling likewise arouses in our heart an oscil- 
lating combination of pleasure with pain. 

“ The strange touch brings some pain and annoy ment to the 
parts unaccustomed to it, but being light it causes some kind of 


CONFLICT-MIXTURE THEORIES 213 


false pleasure, namely, that it does not truly offend, and that 
nature enjoys diversity.” 

Granted the perfect identity of our heart and its 
motions with our experiences of passion, and I see but 
one difficulty in Doctor Joubert’s explanation of laugh- 
ter. That is the fact that, both in tickling and in our 
perception of the comic, this organ is observed to di- 
late more than it contracts. 

‘ The joy which we experience,” he says, “ knowing that there 
is nothing to weep over (except in false appearance), has more 
force upon the heart than has the light sorrow . . . for it is 
necessary to laughter that the pleasure exceed the sadness.” 

I do not see quite why this should be necessary upon 
the physiological side, nor why it should be true upon the 
psychological. If laughter is to be explained as the re- 
sult of a rhythmic alternation between two opposite feel- 
ings, I do not see how we can account for the fact that 
one of these feelings wholly prevails over the other. 
And I suspect the doctor himself of a little uneasiness 
upon this point, for he is careful in one chapter to ex- 
plain that we take a special pleasure in the mixture of 
pleasure and pain, because they each compel the other 
to be moderate, and so eliminate the danger of our 
either laughing or crying ourselves to death ! 

It seems likely that Descartes was familiar with 
Joubert's book, and that his own definition of humor 
as “a species of joy mixed with hate,” and his more 
simple explanation of the laugh, was a modification of 
what he had read there. Aside from that, however, 


214 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


this early attempt at a conflict-mixture theory com- 
bined with a physiology of laughter, never caught the 
interest of men, and we find the theory arising again 
in a purely psychological form in the eighteenth cen- 
tury among the followers of Christian Wolff. Moses 
Mendelssohn, in his “ Philosophische Schriften,” says 
that laughter is not a sure sign of pleasure, but that it 
is “ grounded rather, as well as weeping, in a contrast 
between perfection and imperfection. Only this con- 
trast must be of no weight and not come home to us 
too strongly, if it is to be laughable.” . . . 

“ Every lack of harmony between means and end, cause and 
effect, between the character of a man and his conduct, between 
thoughts and the manner of their expression, above all, every 
contrast of the great, venerable, pompous, and significant, with 
the valueless, contemptible and little, whose consequences put 
us in no embarrassment, is laughable.” 

Lessing accepted this account of the matter, and gave 
it literary pre-eminence by improving it a little in his 
“Laocoon”: 

“ The ridiculous,” he said, “ requires a contrast between per- 
fections and imperfections. This is the explanation of my friend, 
to which I would add that this contrast must not be too sharp 
and decided, but that the opposites must be such as admit of 
being blended into each other.” 

The emotional content of this idea was exploited to 
the full by the priests of the romantic movement in 
German literature. 

“Humor,” they said, “is the kiss which joy and sorrow give 
each other; it has for its device a smiling tear, it has the head- 


CONFLICT-MIXTURE THEORIES 215 


dress of a Folly adorned with crepe, while shod with the tragic 
sandal and the comic sock; it is also the electric spark which 
plays between the two poles of the contrary words, sentimentality 
and raillery; and we know finally that Joy and Grief, meeting 
in the nocturnal forest, loved without recognizing each other, 
and there was born to them a son, who was Humor.” 

It would seem that this theory of the conflict-mixture 
was peculiarly adapted to the trends of German specu- 
lation, for Goethe also described the laughable as a 
contrast — “a moral contrast,” he said, “which is 
brought into unity for the mind in a harmless fashion.” 
And Novalis defined it as “a mixture which comes to 
nothing.” Jean Paul, as we remember, set out with 
the assertion that this mixture is always of the sublime 
with the trivial, but he described what he called “wit” 
more generously as “the disguised priest who marries 
all couples.” To this Theodor Vischer added that he 
prefers to marry those whose relations do not approve 
of the match. For to Vischer the idea of contrast was 
not enough; there must be a contradiction. The two 
members must actively antagonize, and yet ultimately 
assimilate each other, resolving their differences, Hegel- 
wise, in the formation of a third which comprises them 
both. And this contradiction, fully comprehended, is 
nothing less than “a contradiction of self-consciousness 
with itself.” For when we laugh at the errors of others, 
said Vischer — borrowing again the ideas of Jean Paul 
— it is only because we lend or impute to them our 
own insight, and thus they appear as “conscious of 
their error and yet at the same moment erring, or as 
conscious and unconscious at the same time.” 


216 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


Hegel himself, as we have seen, was wiser than his 
disciples, for he did not pretend that all laughable 
things contain a contrast — but he too seemed to be 
aware that something of objective importance is at 
times implied by the apparently subjective caprice of 
the joker. Schopenhauer also perceived the doubleness 
of the more excellent kinds of jokes, and called them 
“ humor’ ’ in opposition to the other forms of the comic. 
In humor, he said, there is a “ concealed seriousness.’’ 
And even Lipps after frequently asserting that the 
small and ridiculous side of the comic contrast is “a 
relative nothing,” was constrained to add that in the 
best kinds of the comic, which he too called “ humor,” 
this relative nothing turns out to be something after all. 

It appears, according to Lipps, that when we are 
prepared for a sublime thing and encounter a little 
one, not all of our energy runs off in laughter, but a 
"psychic damming” occurs, which leaves this energy 
all the more ready to invest with value a really sublime 
thing, supposing that one turns up. And we are 
moved, too, by the presence of this energy to look back 
over the matter, and see if after all there is not some 
truth in the pretense of sublimity that has been of- 
fered. And supposing we find that there is, then how 
much more enjoyable and lovable is that sublimity 
than if our energy had not just been dammed up for 
the purpose of appreciating it ! 

“ The mission of humor is to make the sublime appear lovable, 
while on the other hand its mission is to seek out the sublime 
in the concealed, in narrowness and oppression, in the ill-con- 


CONFLICT-MIXTURE THEORIES 217 


sidered and disdained, in every kind of smallness and lowli- 
ness. . . . Sublimity in the comic defines the essence of humor.” 

With this idea of “ psychic damming” Lipps is still 
trying to answer the question that troubled the author 
of the “Traite du ris” — the question why the mixture 
of a negative with a positive should increase the value 
of the positive. And this same question has troubled 
every one of those Germans, both metaphysicians and 
scientists, who have earnestly attempted to explain the 
comic as a conflicting mixture of two elements. 

Solger tried to solve it by declaring that the comic 
conflict, which for him is one between “reality and the 
idea,” has a kind of “restfulness” in the perception 
that the Idea is everywhere present, and so “even in 
our temporal being we live ever in the beautiful.” 
Another sesthetician, August Wilhelm Bohtz, declared 
that the artist enters into this conflict in order by means 
of the negation to ennoble and give body to his affirma- 
tive ideal, which else w T ere a “mere empty abstrac- 
tion.” Carriere confessed that the negation would 
shock and bewilder us if it persisted, but explained 
our liking to have it arise and then give way to an 
affirmation, by saying that the experience “cheers us 
with the assurance that only the Good, the Beautiful 
and True are also the Enduring and the Real.” Lotze, 
as we have seen, acknowledged that the “Idea” at 
which a joke arrives is not the same one it was looking 
for — there is both failure and success — and he explained 
our liking this combination better than a mere success. 


218 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 

by saying that it proves the world to be a reasonable 
harmony. 

“Only in this happy contemplation of the indestructibility of 
the universal for-each-other-ness of things can I find the charm 
of the absolute comic.” 

Julius Bahnsen took an opposite view of the univer- 
sal for-each-other-ness. A tragic self-contradiction, he 
declared, in the ultimate and only law of life, but humor 
lifts up this contradiction into an intellectual sphere, 
where it can be contemplated with aesthetic freedom 
and so enjoyed in spite of itself. A freeing of the soul 
from interest in either side of the contrast, according 
to his view, is what gives this contrast a value greater 
than that of either of its members. 

In all these various ways the philosophers of the con- 
flict-mixture theory have tried to extricate themselves 
from the difficulty of finding too much joy on their 
hands in a joke. And we might sum them all up by 
saying that each one attributed this joy to the enthusi- 
asm of mankind for the proof of his particular philos- 
ophy. 

The scientists who have endeavored to explain hu- 
mor as a conflicting mixture have found themselves in 
the same difficulty, and they have not had the same 
success in getting out of it. The most elaborate of 
them is Doctor Ewald Hecker, who is generally consid- 
ered the inventor of the idea that comic feeling consists 
of “ a rapid oscillation back and forth between pleasure 
and pain.” We can hardly deny the full credit for 


CONFLICT-MIXTURE THEORIES 219 


this invention to the French doctor, but we must con- 
fess that Hecker made some improvements upon 
Joubert’s physiology. Hecker’s contemporaries had 
proven with experiments upon animals that a stimulus 
of the peripheral nerve-endings produces, through the 
action of the sympathetic nervous system, a contrac- 
tion of the blood-vessels and consequent lowering of 
blood-pressure throughout the body. He observed in 
men when they are tickled a dilation of the pupils of 
the eyes, which also, he said, indicates a stimulation of 
the sympathetic nerves. And from these two facts he 
inferred that a lowering of the blood-pressure in the 
brain is what innervates the muscles of the diaphragm 
which cause laughter, and that the function of laughter 
in tickling is to compensate for that dangerous brain- 
condition by narrowing the thoracic cavity, submitting 
the heart and lungs and greater blood-vessels to a 
strong pressure, and so increasing the force of the cir- 
culation. 

Being satisfied that this was the true explanation of 
tickling, Hecker turned to the problem of the comic. 
And he defined the comic as the simultaneous stimula- 
tion from one source, of two feeling-qualities, pleasure 
and pain, of approximately equal strength. There re- 
sults from their equality of strength an oscillation of 
the attention back and forth between these two feelings, 
and that oscillation has the character of an “inter- 
mittent joyful surprise.” A single joyful surprise, 
Hecker declares, causes us to turn pale for a moment, 
not only in our faces, but all over our bodies, and this 


220 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


indicates a stimulation of the sympathetic nerves simi- 
lar to that which is caused by a peripheral contact. 
An intermittent joyful surprise would naturally there- 
fore cause an intermittent stimulation of the sympa- 
thetic nerves, and thus set in motion the same adjustive 
apparatus that is set in motion by tickling. 

All of Hecker’s admirable physiology rather goes to 
pieces when we remember that tickling is a very pe- 
culiar form of peripheral stimulation, and that laughter 
follows it only in certain moods and conditions. But 
his psychology remains significant — and particularly 
the skilful manner in which he passes from the idea of a 
conflict between two incombinable feelings “of equal 
strength,” one pleasant and the other unpleasant, to the 
idea of an intermittent pleasure: He puts his reliance 
here upon the analogy between this conflict of feelings 
and our way of perceiving a variation between light 
and dark. 

“ In that rapid alternation of fields of vision which we call a 
Glanz,” he says, “the clear light becomes to a certain extent 
more strongly emphasized, and in exactly the same way in the 
rapid alternation of feelings which forms the comic, the pleasant 
feelings prove mainly effective, and we can for the purpose of 
examining the physiological effect of the comic, so far ignore 
the unpleasant feeling — which must never rise to the point of 
psychic pain — that we may regard the comic as an intermittent, 
rhythmically interrupted, joyful excitation of feeling.” 

That this is a frail analogy upon which to build so 
elaborate a doctrine as Hecker’s physiology of laughter 
is obvious enough. Light is an effective stimulus, and 


CONFLICT-MIXTURE THEORIES 221 


dark is rather the absence of it, but the equal strength of 
the two feeling-qualities in the comic — preventing either 
one of them from gaining the mastery — had been the 
essence of Hecker’s assumption. He is in exactly the 
same difficulty, therefore, with Doctor Joubert, and 
with every other scientist or philosopher who has ever 
attempted to define humor as a conflict-mixture. His 
definition rules out that very surplus of pleasure which 
it is supposed to explain. 

In spite of this too evident failing, however, Hecker’s 
general account of humor has held its own in German 
psychology. It determined the opinions both of Krae- 
pelin and of Wundt. And I believe the reason for this 
is that Hecker did come nearer than any other psy- 
chologist to formulating a true definition of the point 
of a joke. “The simultaneousness of the birth of the 
two feelings,” he said, “ constitutes the so-called point, 
without which the comic effect even of a joke or an 
anecdote is lost.” 

Kraepelin did not substantially improve upon Heck- 
er’s psychology of the comic, but only attempted again 
to locate the source of this passion in the brain. It is 
always an “unexpected intellectual contrast,” accord- 
ing to him, which gives rise to this conflict of feelings, 
“in which finally one’s pleasure over the object in 
question gains a greater influence upon his mood 
than his displeasure arising from the same source.” 
And Wundt seems to have followed Kraepelin in this 
judgment. In the fourth edition of his “Grundziige 
der Physiologischen Psychologie,” he inserted the fol- 


/ 


222 THE SENSE OF HUMOR 

lowing statement, which may be regarded as the official 
deliverance of German psychology upon the subject of 
humor: 

“ In the comic the separate ideas which enter into a totality of 
perception or of thought are partly harmonious and partly 
contradictory either to each other or to the manner in which 
they are united. Thus arises an oscillation of feelings, in which, 
however, the positive side, the pleasure, not only prevails, but 
gains the mastery in a particularly strong way, because it is 
like all feelings elevated through the immediate contrast.” 

With all respect to the official psychology, we may 
dismiss this “oscillation of feelings” as an interesting 
myth. But the fact remains — and it seems to have 
been the special German contribution to insist upon 
it — that in the adult and artistic forms of humor an 
apparent combination of a source of pain with a source 
of pleasure produces a more pleasant feeling than 
would arise from the pleasure-source alone. Obviously 
it is no explanation of this, simply to assert that the 
pleasure “ prevails,” and then becomes increased through 
its contrast with the pain. For in order to make it 
plausible that the one does not merely crowd the other 
out of consciousness, it is necessary to assume a certain 
equilibrium between them, and granted such an equi- 
librium, there is nothing in any scientific conception of 
these affections to explain why the pleasure and not the 
pain should be elevated through contrast. We find 
then, in this ultimate dictum of the nineteenth-cen- 
tury psychology, the same unanswered question that 
troubled Doctor Joubert in the days before Bacon, the 


CONFLICT-MIXTURE THEORIES 223 


same question, indeed, that Plato first failed to answer: 
Why does an apparent combination of a pain-source 
with a source of pleasure produce a peculiar pleasure? 
It can be answered by observing that the apparent 
pain-source alone, when our attitude is playful, is in 
reality the source of an emotional interest that is 
pleasant, being greeted with a tendency to laughter by 
an elementary instinct which our language has already 
discerned and described as the sense of humor. 


CHAPTER XI 


HUMOR AS INSTINCT 

A form of knowledge that has developed all too 
quietly in this modern world, considering its vivid im- 
portance, is the science of human behavior resting upon 
the idea of hereditary instincts. I cannot explain all 
that is implied in my theory of humor without some 
recollection of the outlines of that science. Just as our 
understanding of chemistry was set forward into a new 
era by the discovery that the material world is made 
out of a limited number of elements, and by the gradual 
identification of these elements, so our understanding 
of morals, or education, has been set forward by the 
discovery and identification of those primary instincts 
out of which all human motives and emotions are 
compounded. It was Robert Boyle who conceived 
the idea of irreducible elements in matter, and it was 
his contemporary, Malebranche, who made the first 
significant attempt to isolate and define certain “ in- 
clinations or natural motions of the mind.” The 
speculations of Malebranche were not decisive, be- 
cause, like Boyle, he lacked any definite standards by 
which to distinguish elements from their compounds. 
But his guesses were not substantially improved upon 
until our own time, when William McDougall, in his 

224 


HUMOR AS INSTINCT 


225 


“Social Psychology,” did propose tests by which in- 
stincts that are innate and universal can be distin- 
guished from the more complex and fragile conditions 
of feeling and impulse which develop in the passage of 
a life. 

McDougall defined an instinct, in accordance with 
the general scientific usage, as “ An inherited or innate 
psycho-physical disposition which determines its pos- 
sessor to perceive, and to pay attention to, objects of 
a certain class, to experience an emotional excitement 
of a particular quality upon perceiving such an object, 
and to act in regard to it in a particular manner, or, 
at least, to experience an impulse to such action.” He 
proposed to identify these instincts, first, by the 
unique and irreducible quality of the emotional excite- 
ment; second, by their occurrence not only in man 
but also in the higher animals; and third, by their 
occasional morbid exaggeration in human beings who 
seem otherwise perfectly sane and healthy — for it would 
seem, he said, “that each instinctive disposition, being 
a relatively independent functional unit in the constitu- 
tion of the mind, is capable of morbid hypertrophy or 
of becoming abnormally excitable, independently of the 
rest of the mental dispositions and functions.” 

The principal instincts whose existence McDougall 
believed he had ascertained in this manner, and the 
corresponding primary emotions so far as these have 
been identified with a name, were these: 

1. Flight fear. 

2. Repulsion disgust. 


226 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


3. Curiosity wonder. 

4. Pugnacity anger. 

5. Self-abasement subjection. 

6. Self-display elation. 

7. Parental instinct tender emotion. 

8. Sexual instinct. 

9. Gregariousness. 

10. Acquisition. 

11. Construction. 

These specific instincts, supplemented by certain 
“general innate tendencies” — sympathy, suggestibility, 
imitation, play, rivalry — and by the law of habit, are 
supposed to comprise all the elements that enter into 
the complex of human motivation. They supply the 
material, according to McDougall, for explaining our 
conduct and our emotions. His lists have been 
altered, of course, and his account of the causes of 
action complicated somewhat by the contributions of 
other psychologists. 1 But it will hardly be denied 
that there is a basic distinction such as he described 
between the emotion of fear, for instance, and that of 
reproach, which he says arises from a combination of 
anger with tender emotion, or scorn which seems to be 
almost an accurate name for disgusted anger. 

The position that I have taken in this book is that 
humor is an element. The sense of humor is a primary 
instinct of our nature, functioning originally only in 
the state of play, and related not remotely in its devel- 

1 As an example of the present complication of these theories, 
and to suggest the free play of opinion about them, I give the 


HUMOR AS INSTINCT 227 

opment to that gregarious instinct of which smiles and 
smiling laughter appear to be an inherent part. 

That humorous laughter belongs among the heredi- 
tary instincts is indicated by the fact that it appears 
so early and so spontaneously. We never have to 
teach children when to laugh; we have to teach them 
when not to laugh. And if some little argument is 
required to show them the superiority of clever jokes 
over crude humor, that is because their gift of laughter 
is lustier than ours, and they are not so agile in per- 
ception and the apprehension of meanings. Only an 
instinctively humorous creature could, without warn- 

following table from a recent excellent volume by James Drever, 
called “Instinct in Man”: 

Innate Tendencies 


“Appetite” Tendencies “Instinct” Tendencies 


General Specific 



General 

(Seeking of Pleasure (Hunger 



(Play 

Avoidance of Pain) Thirst 



Experimentation 

Sleep 



Imitation 

Sex 



Sympathy 

Nausea) 



Suggestibility) 


Specific 

1 


i 

“Pure” 



1 

“Emotional” 

(Probably numerous though difficult to 


(Fear 

distinguish from reflexes and 

may 


Anger 

perhaps be classified as: 



Hunting 

Reactions of Adjustment and At- 


Acquisitive 

tention 



Curiosity 

Reactions of Prehension 



Gregarious 

Reactions of Locomotion 



Courtship 

Reactions of Vocalization) 



Self-display 

Self-abasement 




Parental) 


228 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


ing or instruction, enjoy seeing a trusted countenance 
turn suddenly into a grinning ape or gargoyle, and 
laugh instead of crying out in pain. And yet this 
humor of the “ comic masque/’ which Aristotle cited 
as the type of mature comedy, is the first thing we rely 
upon when a baby is by some relentless destiny com- 
mitted to our care and entertainment. We rely upon 
his having so keen a lust for the absurd and ludicrous 
in play that we need only by laughing a little ourselves 
to intimate that we are not to be taken seriously, and 
then contrive any very negative programme of shocks 
and disappointments — things which would clearly irri- 
tate if they did not in their own nature satisfy the in- 
tense interest he gives them. 

“As children only do we laugh,” said Balzac, “and 
w r hen we travel onward laughter sinks dowm and dies 
out like the light of the oil-lit lamp.” It sinks down 
and dies out, and we have to revive it then, and make 
it flare up with little extra breaths of hidden meaning, 
and little victories and hostilities and exposures of the 
flesh, that give point to our droll stories. And if we are 
proud of these momentary accomplishments, we can 
hardly look back with scorn upon the days wdien they 
were unnecessary. We can, at most, permit ourselves 
to believe that if age inhibits the free flow of this play- 
instinct, that inhibition increases our inw 7 ard feeling 
of it, and the positive thing toward which w T e do re- 
lease our laughter is a little more suffused w r ith humor- 
ous emotion. 

A further indication that humorous laughter be- 


HUMOR AS INSTINCT 


229 


longs among the instinctive emotions of mankind is 
the fact that it can be communicated from one to an- 
other through sympathy. Primitive and fundamental 
sympathy is an adjustment of our nervous systems by 
virtue of which we experience an impulse and emotion, 
not only upon perceiving its appropriate object, but 
also upon perceiving its characteristic expression and 
activity in others of our kind. Thus we experience 
fear when we see people frightened, tender emotion 
when we see them tender. It seems that every one of 
the primary instincts is so capable of sympathetic in- 
duction. And there is no one of them, unless it be 
the very condition of sociability itself, which surpasses 
the sense of humor in this characteristic. I have been 
very careful to observe that when I hear or see a group 
of people laughing heartily at some funny tale or in- 
cident, although I have not heard or seen the thing at 
which they laugh, my own response is not only laugh- 
ter but humorous emotion. And this fact completely 
refutes the theory of Lipps and Spencer, that humorous 
laughter is a mechanical result of the passage of atten- 
tion over a defined series of objects or ideas. It re- 
futes also the theory that such laughter is a mere sign 
of release, for no matter what one’s own condition 
when he notices that others are enjoying a joke — 
whether he is tense with enterprise or some attempt at 
propriety, or whether he is relaxed and perhaps half 
asleep in a railroad berth — that subtle and incompara- 
ble enjoyment steals through him just the same. 
Humorous laughter is infectious — and that alone is 


230 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


sufficient to establish it among the other instinctive 
adjustments of mankind to his environment. 

And this infection can be conveyed, not only by the 
process properly called sympathy, but also by the al- 
lied process of suggestion. Humor depends, indeed, 
more than any other quality strived after in art or con- 
versation, upon the existence of a favorable atmosphere. 
The books which tickled us out of our senses when 
we thought they were funny, taste as flat as lime- 
water when somebody points out that they are not. 
And if we are competently assured that a great comical 
entertainment is in progress, it matters little what an- 
tique fribble and monkey-shine is gone through with. 
No reputation is more secure, once it is established, 
than that of the national humorist or comedian. The 
mere report that one of these great men will appear, 
sets in action the machinery for enjoying his jokes, 
however poor they may be. Our sense of humor is 
subject to stampede — and that too places it in the same 
general class with fear and anger. 

That it stands parallel with these instincts as a 
primary element in our emotional life is proven in the 
first place by the perfect uniqueness of the humorous 
emotion. None of the other instincts, not even these 
two, have a feeling-quality that is less possible to 
analyze, or reduce through examination, into more 
simple components. We remember how Lipps refuted 
the theories of his predecessors with the statement that 
“The feeling of the comic is a feeling of the comic and 
nothing else,” and how it seemed possible to refute the 


HUMOR AS INSTINCT 


231 


theory of Lipps with the same statement. This would 
not have been possible if the feeling we were discussing 
had been something like reproach, or gratitude, or rever- 
ence. And the importance of Lipps’s statement is that 
it separates the comic from such feelings, and brings it 
successfully past the first of McDougall’s three tests 
of the elementary-instinctive. 

As to his second test — the occurrence of the same in- 
stinct in the higher animals — we have here only a very 
ancient doubt. The scholastic and literary opinion of 
mankind has been that laughter, and more especially 
humorous laughter, is a distinguishing attribute of men 
and gods. Aristotle, Rabelais, Voltaire, Balzac, Bacon, 
Milton, Hazlitt, Lamennais, Schopenhauer, Bergson — 
the list is long of those distinguished humans who have 
flattered their species with this attribution. But the 
simple and childlike judgment of the race is entirely 
upon the other side. Professor G. Stanley Hall found 
among all the seven hundred responses to his ques- 
tionnaire about laughter, both from adults and chil- 
dren, “the almost unanimous opinion that animals 
laugh.” And it happens that this popular opinion has 
received more support from trained scientific observers 
than the classic tradition. Darwin in “The Descent 
of Man” said that “Dogs show what may be fairly 
called a sense of humor, as distinct from mere play,” 
and his statement was supported and illustrated by 
G. J. Romanes. Leon Dumont said that “In playing 
with a young dog, when we make the gesture of seizing 
him by one ear and really seize him by the other, we 


232 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


are persuaded that we awaken in his consciousness the 
same phenomena which in man express themselves by 
laughter.” James Sully is convinced that both dogs 
and certain kinds of monkeys have the germ of our 
sense of the ludicrous, although he does not clearly 
distinguish this from the more general sense of fun. 
And C. Lloyd Morgan, in his “ Animal Life and Intelli- 
gence,” quotes both Darwin and Romanes, and adds 
a further example from his own observations of 
the apparent humor of dogs, although he is too cau- 
tious to assert that dogs actually experience such a 
feeling. 

His caution is but the symptom of a general change 
of temper in comparative psychology. It is no longer 
the fashion to imagine what animals have in their con- 
sciousness; we try to content ourselves with describing 
how they behave. Darwin assures us that monkeys 
make a noise and a motion somewhat like human 
laughter when they are tickled, and any one who plays 
with children and with dogs can observe that many of 
the simple tricks and trippings which give comic 
amusement to children are welcomed by dogs, and 
excite them so that instead of going away they dance 
about as though asking for more of the same experi- 
ence. We can say at least that when a playing dog 
“ gets the worst of it,” he “ takes it in good part.” And 
therefore if our account of the humorous instinct is 
correct, we can assert that its rudiments do exist in 
dogs — as no doubt in a few other complex and playful 
animals. But we cannot very well employ that asser- 


HUMOR AS INSTINCT 233 

tion in proof that our account is correct. We can only 
observe that there is no evidence here to oppose it. 

It happens, however, that we can well dispense with 
this particular point of proof. For our most formida- 
ble opponents are those who would explain humor as a 
manifestation of some universal property of neural and 
cerebral activity — the state of release, of overflow, of 
economy — and for the confirmation of their theories 
it is essential that all fairly advanced animals should 
make the same or a similar manifestation. But for 
us it is in a peculiar way unessential, because if the 
sense of humor is instinctive, and its biological value 
and history such as we have said, this instinct would 
surely be one of the latest to evolve. It would have no 
value except as other instincts began to be inadequate, 
and life became so various and experimental as to de- 
mand a long period of practice in play. It would be 
an equipment only of complex, alert, and delicate or- 
ganisms, and of these perhaps only in their infancy. It 
would be so swift and rudimentary a reaction that we 
could hardly recognize its operation. The mild doubt 
which exists about this question, therefore, while re- 
futing our principal opponents, leaves us the more sure, 
not only that humor is instinctive, but that it is such 
an instinct as we have declared it to be. 

The third test of the elementary-instinctive which 
McDougall proposed — its occurrence in exaggerated 
form in some morbid condition not involving a general 
exaggeration of nervous functions — is met by the sense 
of humor as perfectly, I think, as by any of the in- 


234 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


stincts. The spasm of mad laughter is so frequent a 
form of morbid convulsion that to the popular mind this 
is the meaning of the word hysteria. And in these con- 
vulsions the laughter, although sometimes preceding or 
following or merely accompanying a more general 
muscular spasm, is frequently the sole essence of the 
attack. In an article composed as though to prove 
this very point, Doctor Jose Ingegnieros classifies the 
forms of the “rire hysterique” in such a way as to make 
this clear, and to make clear also that it is not only the 
act of laughter, but the humorous laugh, which is 
subject to this morbid intensification. He has him- 
self observed a case in which a mood of comedy con- 
tinued during the waking hours for twenty days, and 
he recalls the example described by Binet and Ray- 
mond of a woman who suffered for more than four 
months from a perpetual laugh. “Everything around 
her seemed to her ridiculous.” It is well known that 
these seizures of comicality can be induced in a healthy 
person by administering about a fifth of a grain of the 
extract of hashish or Indian hemp. Gautier, in “Le 
Club des Hachischins,” has described for the imagina- 
tion the effect of this essence of comedy circulating in 
the blood-vessels through the brain. It was described 
in a more scientific way, but also upon the basis of 
personal experience, by Doctor Binet-Sangle. We do 
not need pathology or poison, however, to make us 
see the humorous reaction carried to a point where it 
must be considered an “ independent functional unit,” 
for we can all remember being seized with fits of ecstati- 


HUMOR AS INSTINCT 


235 


cally comic laughter, not unlike the entranced par- 
oxysms of love and anger. They carried us out of 
reality, out of ourselves and our sureness of ourselves. 
They were mad, but they were not morbid. The mere 
recollection of the bliss of these mad moments ought 
to convince us that as long as the other besieging pas- 
sions are explained upon the theory of hereditary in- 
stinct, humorous laughter will be so explained by those 
who properly esteem it. 

And so here again it seems to be an inadequate ap- 
praisement of the subject-matter which has set the 
philosophers and pundits of abstract human nature off 
the track of the true explanation of laughter. They 
have failed to realize, not only how continual laughter 
is, but how intense the humorous passion. And if this 
is due in some cases to a slenderness of that passion 
in their own constitutions, then their very theories of 
laughter may be offered in evidence of its functional 
independence. For no doubt a marked depression of 
any emotional function, without the general poverty of 
feeling, offers as good proof of the primary among our 
instincts as the more startling testimony of the mad- 
house. And whatever may be true of these philoso- 
phers, there are at least many estimable and warm, 
and even merry-hearted, acquaintances of ours who 
“have no sense of humor,” just as there are others 
who “cannot get mad,” and even a few who “do not 
know what it means to be afraid.” And whenever we 
describe these acquaintances as lacking in that sense, we 
put in doubt the Mechanical Theory, and the Theory 


236 


THE SENSE OF HUMOR 


of Laughter as Liberty, and Freud’s Theory. And 
since we most often so describe the ones who are well 
possessed of pride and self-estimation and glory, both 
sudden and gradual, we put in doubt also the Derision 
Theory. We speak of the sense of humor as a distinct 
hereditary emotional endowment, and that is what an 
instinct is. 


NOTES AND REFERENCES 




NOTES AND REFERENCES 


Page 3 

“A pert challenge”: The quotation is from Henri Bergson’s 
“ Laughter, An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic,” translated 
by Brereton and Rothwell, p. 1. 

Page 5 

“So delicate an employment of the features”: Paolo Mante- 
gazza in his “Physiognomy and Expression,” chap. IX, gives a 
“synoptical table of the expression of pleasure,” containing 
thirty-nine elements. The laugh itself was described by Charles 
Darwin in “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Ani- 
mals,” and with still greater detail by C. Vanlair in an article on 
“La physiologie du rire” in the Bulletin de la Classe des Sciences 
of the Academie Roy ale de Belgique , 1903, no. 12, p. 1295. Van- 
lair calls it “The effective act of laughter.” 

“The two cannot be distinguished”: This is the opinion of 
such divergent observers as Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud 
(see pp. 207 and 199 of this book), of W. Preyer (see note to p. 7), 
and of Vanlair and Mantegazza (see note above) . Leon Dumont, 
Robert de Lamennais, and L. Dugas (see notes to pp. 157, 147, 
and 133) are among those who have taken the opposite view, al- 
though their own native tongue, like many others, might have 
taught them that the smile is a “sub-laugh” — sourire , sorridere , 
subridere , lacheln , sonreir. The Hindu philosophers distinguished 
six different grades in the expression of mirth, beginning with 
the smile and ending with the convulsive laugh. (See references 
in note to p. 163.) 

“ Charles Fourier never smiled”: See “Albert Brisbane, A 
Mental Biography,” by R. Brisbane. 

“Laugh with the lips”: a Greek phrase for insincere laughter, 
239 


240 


NOTES AND REFERENCES 


Page 7 

“Sardonic”: This derivation was suggested by Salomon 
Reinach (see note to p. 9), after rejecting the two classic tradi- 
tions — that sardonic laughter was named after a Sardinian herb 
which “screwed up the face of the eater,” and that it was named 
after the people of Sardis who laughed when they sacrificed their 
babies to the gods. 

“The fortieth day”: It was Aristotle, I believe, who said that 
babies smile on the fortieth day, and to judge by their modern 
biographers, that is a fair statement of the average. Darwin’s 
two sons smiled on the forty-fifth day; Mantegazza’s five chil- 
dren between the fortieth and sixtieth day; Preyer’s child on the 
twenty-sixth day, and the heroine of Miss Shinn’s “Biography 
of a Baby” was “jolly” in the second month. Zoroaster is sup- 
posed to have been born laughing — a more convincing sign of 
divinity, perhaps, than the immaculate conception. 

“Smile of dawning welcome”: The reader will understand that 
I do not mean to attribute to the consciousness of the baby the 
values that this smile has for his parents. All that we can say 
about the baby is that human faces interest him peculiarly, and 
cause him to smile oftener than other objects, and that the smile 
he directs toward them is very early distinguishable from the 
mere expression of cheerful interest. It soon becomes a definite 
and conscious act. To me the facts about babies recorded by 
W. Preyer and Miss Shinn and James Sully and others, although 
not so interpreted by them, seem to accord with the assumption 
that the smile directed toward a friendly countenance is not 
merely imitative nor due to an association of bodily comforts 
with this apparition, but has the character of an instinctive re- 
sponse. The parents were babies once, and if the baby’s smile 
is so rich with emotional meaning for them, that is some indi- 
cation of its intrinsic nature. 

A good many different acts of laughter have been distinguished 
by various observers — a laugh of sexual and hostile glee (see p. 
42), a laugh caused by chilliness, by fear (the “laughter of the 
damned”), hysterical laughter, maniac laughter, the mimic re- 
flex laughter of idiots, a laughter caused by chemical exhilarants, 
and even a peculiar laugh at the moment of deliverance from 


NOTES AND REFERENCES 


241 


danger (Harold Hoff ding — see note to p. 141, and Salomon 
Reinach — see note to p. 9); and in addition to these, of course, 
the laughter that is merely a general expression of pleasure. 

Aside from observation, my reasons for regarding an act of so- 
cial welcome as the “original” laugh, are, first, that it has a very 
great biological importance, and, second, that it explains the 
laughter which is an “expression of pleasure” in a way similar 
to that in which other expressions have been explained. (See 
chap. IX of Part II.) The reader should understand, however, 
that my opinion here is not supported by any authority, and it 
is not vital to my explanation of humor. For that, he need only 
recognize that laughter has somehow become, in a very general 
sense, “an expression of joy or pleasure.” And upon this all 
modern observers are agreed. 

See W. Preyer, “Die Seele des Kindes,” pp. 193-7; also the 
translations, “Mental Development in the Child” and “The 
Mind of the Child”; James Sully, “Essay on Laughter,” chap. 
VI, pp. 164-170; Millicent W. Shinn, “The Biography of a 
Baby” and “Notes on the Development of a Child”; G. Stanley 
Hall (note to p. 132) and Paolo Mantegazza (note to p. 5). 

Page 9 

The quotation is from Edmund Spenser. 

The fact about ritual laughter, with others equally interest- 
ing, is to be found in an article by Salomon Reinach called “Le 
rire rituel” in the Revue de L’Universite de Bruxelles for May, 

1911. 

Page 12 

As I have not entirely respected any of the established “the- 
ories of play,” I refer the reader to the following books and 
articles where he can find out about them : “The Play of Animals,” 
by Karl Groos, translated by J. Mark Baldwin, and “The Play 
of Man,” by the same author, translated by Elizabeth L. Bald- 
win, will give him a fmll account of the Practice Theory. This 
theory is interestingly criticised by H. M. Stanley in an article 
called “Professor Groos and Theories of Play” in the Psychologi- 
cal Review , vol. 6, pp. 86-92. 

The so-called Recapitulation Theory he will find suggested by 


242 


NOTES AND REFERENCES 


G. Stanley Hall in his “ Adolescence,” vol. I, chap. Ill, p. 160, 
and vol. II, chap. XII. 

The theory of play as an overflow of superabundant nervous 
energy, originated by the poet Schiller and by Herbert Spencer, 
is developed in a modern way by H. A. Carr in an article on 
“The Survival Values of Play” in the Investigations of the De- 
partment of Psychology and Education of the University of Colo- 
rado, vol. 1, no. 2, November, 1902. These theories are in turn 
criticised by G. T. W. Patrick in an article on “The Psychology 
of Play” in the Pedagogical Seminary, vol. XXI, no. 3. Patrick 
says that “play is just the name we give to the child’s activities,” 
and this view is supported by Lilia Estelle Appleton in her “Com- 
parative Study of the Play Activities of Adult Savages and Civ- 
ilized Children.” She thinks that an impulse to act and an 
organism at a certain stage of development is all that is needed 
to explain play. From which we may infer that professional 
psychologists are approaching the wisdom of Mark Twain, whose 
second chapter of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” deserves a 
place among the classics of this discussion. “If Tom had been 
a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book,” says 
Mark Twain, “he would now have comprehended that work 
consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that play con- 
sists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.” 

W. Preyer, in his famous book on “The Mind of the Child,” 
said that a satisfactory theory of play is wanting, and perhaps 
the statement is still true. But it seems to me that the descrip- 
tion of play in McDougall’s “Social Psychology” is at least the 
proper point of departure in the search for such a theory. It is 
significant that in his first book, “The Play of Animals,” Karl 
Groos described play as instinctive, and J. Mark Baldwin stated 
in the translator’s introduction that “Play is a veritable in- 
stinct.” As instincts are supposed, however, to be responses to 
some specific objects or situations, this view was a good deal 
criticised, and in his second book, “The Play of Man,” Groos 
adopted a more vague and non-committal attitude that is even 
less satisfactory. McDougall found a way between these two 
errors with his conception of “General Innate Tendencies,” and 
his statement that we must recognize “some special differentia- 
tion of the instincts which find expression in playful activity.” 


NOTES AND REFERENCES 243 


It is from the vantage-ground of this conception that I have been 
able to describe play as I have. 

Page 13 

“We do not know much in a scientific way”: See note to p. 
58, or read the chapter on “Pleasure and Pain,” or “The Affec- 
tions,” in any text-book of psychology. “The psychology of 
feeling is still, in large measure, a psychology of personal opinion 
and belief.” — E. B. Titchener, “A Text Book of Psychology,” 
p. 226. An interesting recent opinion is that of Edward J. 
Kempf in “The Autonomic Functions and the Personality.” 

Page 14 

“A different act”: Preyer tells us that he was able to dis- 
tinguish in the next room the laughter of his child at tickling 
from the laughter that was an expression of pleasure. (“Die 
Seele des Kindes,” p. 197.) 

Page 15 

“A chronic habit of violent laughing”: Described by the 
Danish psychologist Lange in his book on the Emotions, and 
cited by L. Dugas in “La psychologie du rire.” 


Page 16 

Plato: “ Philebus.” 

“A modern scientist”: G. Stanley Hall — see note to p. 132. 
For other opinions upon this subject, see pp. 158-161 of this book. 


Page 18 

Rabelais: Prologue to book IV. My acquaintance with Ra- 
belais is through the translation by Thomas Urquhart and Peter 
Motteux, itself one of the great achievements of English litera- 

ture * Page 23 

“Sad documents”: “What is Man?” published anonymously 
in 1906; “The Mysterious Stranger,” published after Mark 
Twain’s death, and also the “Autobiography.” 


Page 24 

This description of the religious state of mind I first suggested 
in an article on “The Religion of Patriotism” in The Masses for 
July, 1917. 


244 


NOTES AND REFERENCES 


Lamennais and Johann Erdmann : See note to p. 147. In oppo- 
sition to them we have the authority of the Right Reverend, the 
Bishop of Tasmania, for the assertion that God laughs and en- 
joys an occasional joke (“The Theology of Laughter,” Hibbert 
Journal, vol. 9, p. 296). The Bishop sets us wondering whether 
God enjoyed that one of Oliver Wendell Holmes about the 
“Right Reverend Successors of Him who had not where to lay 
his head.” 

Page 35 

Aristophanes: “The Frogs.” 

For an example of the difference between scorn and ridicule 
compare Tolstoy’s account of Wagner’s operas in the appendix 
of his book “What is Art?” with that of Mark Twain in “A 
Tramp Abroad,” chap. IX. 

Page 39 

“Uncle Toby”: Tristram Shandy, Book II, chap. VII. 

Page 43 

Aristophanes: “The Acharnians,” 644-5. Compare “The 
Knights,” 510, and “The Satires of Horace,” book I, no. 1, 1. 24: 
“What prevents our telling truth with a laugh?” 

Page 45 

Cicero : “ De Oratore.” 

Page 50 

Mark Twain: “A Tramp Abroad,” chap. XIII. 

Page 53 

“The Theory of the Leisure Class”: A book most inappro- 
priately named, for it will tell any one in any class why he does 
most of the futile things he does. 

Page 54 

Laurence Sterne: “Tristram Shandy,” book I, chap. VII. 

Page 55 

Mr. Dooley: “On Making a Will.” 


NOTES AND REFERENCES 


245 


Page 56 

Henry Fielding: “Tom Jones,” book I, chap. V. 

Page 58 

“A painful or unpleasant feeling may arise in us in two differ- 
ent ways”: This fact is expressed a little more physiologically in 
the lines I have italicized in this paragraph from Thorndyke’s 
book on “The Original Nature of Man,” p. 128: “I believe that 
the original tendencies of man to be satisfied and to be annoyed 
— to welcome and reject — are described by these three laws of 
readiness and unreadiness: (1) That when a conduction unit [a 
given path, that is, in the brain and nervous system] is ready to 
conduct, conduction by it is satisfying, nothing being done to 
alter its action; (2) that for a conduction unit ready to conduct not 
to conduct is annoying , and provokes whatever responses nature 
provides in connection with that particular annoying lack ; (3) that 
when a conduction unit unready for conduction is forced to conduct , 
conduction by it is annoying. 1 1 

That paragraph will indicate to the reader how little, and 
how vaguely, the psychologists have succeeded in understanding 
pain and pleasure, and the consequent limits of our own explana- 
tion of humor. 

Page 59 

“The range of our enjoyment”: “It would be hard to find 
any disaster so great that it has not been a source of genuine 
mirth.” — G. Stanley Hall. (See note to p. 132.) 

Page 61 

“Absurd”: This word is very commonly used to describe 
those poetically humorous perceptions which I call ludicrous , 
and my restriction of its meaning here is arbitrary. 

Page 64 

“Repartee”: To prove that the “coming to nothing,” and not 
the “sudden glory,” is what gives humor to these exchanges, we 
need only remember that the same game can be played in the 
reverse fashion, the original thesis being an assertion of playful 
humility, and the victory going to him who demeans himself 
the most. 


246 


NOTES AND REFERENCES 


Page 69 

Addison: The Spectator (see note to p. 144). 

Page 74 

“Choice and comparison”: In my “Enjoyment of Poetry,” 
chaps. Ill, IV, V, and VI, I have explained upon this basis the 
psychology of poetic figures. What I have said there about 
poetry underlies all that I say here about poetic humor. 


Page 77 

“Degradation”: This is James Sully’s expression in his “Essay 
on Laughter.” 

The incident of the angel — from the heaven scene in Charlie 
Chaplin’s film, “The Kid” — is a better example of his humor 
than his acting. The incident of the cow is from an earlier 
film called “Sunnyside.” I hope that the “movie fan” who 
reads this will not identify the change I have described with the 
appearance of serious dramatic pathos in “The Bad.” It was 
both a more gradual and a more unusual change than that. 


Page 80 

“A tortoise-shell cat”: This was Mark Twain’s description 
of the picture. 

Page 86 

“Smile talk” is a literal translation of a Chinese word for 
“joke.” 

Page 93 


“Peculiar Disaster”: 
Catullus. 


“Risu inepto res ineptior nulla est.” — 
Page 94 


Rabelais: “Put me on my domino, for I am cold — besides I 
want to die in it, for Beati qui in Domino Moriuntur.” 

Heine : Speaking to a priest who urged him to make his peace 
with God, he said: “Dieu me pardonnera, c’est son metier.” 


Page 97 

Mark Twain : The story is told by his biographer, Albert Bige- 
low Paine, and the speech published in the volume called “Mark 


NOTES AND REFERENCES 


247 


Twain’s Speeches.” Whoever wishes to know this man should 
read Van Wyck Brooks’s admirable study, “The Ordeal of Mark 
Twain.” 

Page 98 

Rabelais: Prologue to book I. 

Page 102 

The quotation is from Shakespeare’s “King Henry IV.” 

Page 109 

De Quincey: “Essay on Conversation.” 

Page 114 

Aristophanes: “The Frogs.” The lines in verse are from Gil- 
bert Murray’s translation. The prose translation is my own. 

Page 115 

Cephisophon: see Dunster’s translation of “The Frogs.” Gil- 
bert Murray says that Cephisophon was a kind of secretary to 
Euripides. Benjamin Rogers says that he was a friend. J. H. 
Frere says that he was an actor in the plays. 

Page 117 

Shakespeare: “Love’s Labour’s Lost.” 

Page 119 

“Sentimental Tommy”: by James M. Barrie, pp. 19 and 35. 

Page 123 

“Theories of Humor”: In this history I have not attempted 
to rake up and make record of everything that has been written 
about laughter or the comic, but only to give a true general 
picture, and omit no particular idea that is of unique value or 
interest. 

When not otherwise described in the notes, the translations 
are my own. 

Plato: “Philebus,” Jowett’s translation. 46-50. Compare 
“The Republic,” V, 452. 

Page 124 

Aristotle: “Poetics,” V, translated by S. H. Butcher. 


248 


NOTES AND REFERENCES 


Page 125 

Plato: “Republic/’ III, 388; “Thesetetus,” 174. See also 
“Cratylus,” 645. 

Page 126 

Rabelais: Prologue to book I. 

Plato: “Symposium/’ 177. 

Page 127 

Plato: “Symposium,” 189. 

Page 128 

Aristotle: “Rhetoric,” book III, chap. XI. 

Page 130 

Cicero: “De Oratore,” book II, 54-71. Some of the transla- 
tions from Cicero are my own, others from the book by W. 
Guthrie. 


Page 131 

Quintilian: “Institutes of the Orator.” Translated by J. 
Patsall, book VI, chap. III. 

Page 132 

Hume: “A Treatise of Human Nature.” 

Jean Paul: See note to p. 169. 

“The Psychology of Tickling, Laughing and the Comic”: by 
G. Stanley Hall and Arthur Allin, American J ournal of Psychology, 
October, 1897. See also the remarks of H. M. Stanley in the 
same journal for January, 1898. 

Page 133 

Ribot: “Psychology of the Emotions.” Translated in the 
Contemporary Science Series, pp. 352-7. 

L. Dugas: “Psychologie du rire,” 1902. 

Croce: “L’Umorismo,” Journal of Comparative Literature, vol. 
I, no. 3. 

Cazamian: “Pourquoi nous ne pouvons definir rhumour,” 
Revue Germanique for 1906, 


NOTES AND REFERENCES 


249 


Page 136 

Saint Gregory of Nyssa: Translated by Benjamin Rand in his 
“Classical Psychologists/’ p. 127. 

Page 137 

The quotations are from “The Courtier/’ by Baldassare Cas- 
tiglione, done into English by Sir Thomas Hoby, anno 1561. 
The original book was completed in 1516. 

Page 138 

The statements about Tresseno, Maggi, and Robertelli are 
made on the authority of J. E. Spingarn in his “History of 
Literary Criticism in the Renaissance.” 

Page 139 

L. Joubert: “Traite du ris,” 1579. 

Hobbes: “Leviathan,” part I, chap. VI. 

Page 140 

“Sudden glory”: Compare the phrase “Selbstgefiihl in statu 
nascendi,” used by the German psychologist Heymans to ex- 
press a similar idea, Zeitschrift fur Psychol, und Physiol, der 
Sinnesorgane f XI, 31-43, and XX, 164-173. 

De Lamennais: See note to p. 147. , 

Page 141 

Hobbes: “Human Nature,” part I, chap. IX, 13. 

Descartes: “Passions de Fame,” III, 178. 

A. Zeising: “iEsthetische Forschungen,” 1855. 

Karl Groos: “Einleitung in die iEsthetik,” 1892, quoted 
by Franz Jahn (see note to p. 218). “Die Spiele des Men- 
schen,” 1899. 

Harald Hoff ding, in his “Outlines of Psychology,” and also in 
his book on “Den Store Humor,” translated into German under 
the title “Humor als Lebensgefiihl,” combines the derision and 
the disappointment theories in a manner similar to that of Groos 

and Zeising. _ „ ^ 

& Page 142 

Th. Ziegler: “Das Gefuhl,” 1893, pp. 142-7. Kuno Fischer 
had also emphasized the playfulness of the comic attitude, de- 


250 NOTES AND REFERENCES 


fining wit as “playful judgment ” in his essay “Ueber den 
Witz,” 1889. 

Stephan Schiitze: “Versuch Einer Theorie des Komischen,” 


1817. 


Page 143 


Otto Schauer: “Ueber das Wesen der Komik,” Archiv fur die 
Gesamte Psychologie, XVIII, 1910. 

Lillien J. Martin: “Psychology of ^Esthetics — Experimental 
Prospecting in the Field of the Comic,” American Journal of 
Psychology, January, 1905. 

Page 144 


Dugas: “Psychologie du rire.” 

Addison: The Spectator , April 10, 1711, no. 35. 


Page 145 

Lord Shaftesbury: “On the Freedom of Wit and Humor.” 
(See also p. 184.) 

Bain: “The Emotions and the Will,” chapter on “The Emo- 
tion of Power.” 

Page 147 

De Lamennais: “Esquisse d'une Philosophic,” book IX, chap. 
II, p. 369. See also Professor J. E. Erdmann's “Ernste Spiele,” 
in which we are advised that we should not speak of hearty 
laughter, because “laughter is in fact heartless.” 


Page 148 

Henri Bergson: See note to p. 1. Compare with Bergson's 
statement the opinion of Walter Pater that “pity” is “of the 
essence of humor.” (Postscript, p. 254.) I know of no better 
way to disprove Bergson's assertion than by reading to a person 
of quick sympathy Stephen Leacock's little masterpiece, “My 
Financial Career.” (See “Literary Lapses,” p. 9.) 

Page 149 

Irvin Cobb: “The Trail of the Lonesome Laugh,” Everybody's 
Magazine, April, 1911. 

Page 151 

Voltaire: Preface to “L'Enfant Prodigue.” 


NOTES AND REFERENCES 


251 


Page 152 

Spinoza: “Ethics,” part IV, prop, xlv, note. 

Pascal: Quoted by Dugas in “La psychologie du rire.” 

Page 153 

Kant: “The Critique of Judgment,” translated by J. H. 
Bernard, p. 223. 

Page 154 

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling: “Sammtliche Werke,” 
First Part, vol. V, p. 711. 

Schopenhauer: “The World as Will and Idea,” translated by 
Haldane and Kemp, 1819. 

Page 156 

London Spectator , June 29, 1907. 

Page 157 

“Conflict of habit systems”: A phrase employed by H. Heath 
Bawden in an article on “The Comic as Illustrating the Sum- 
mation-Irradiation Theory of Pleasure-Pain,” in the Psychologi- 
cal Review , September, 1910. 

Leon Dumont: “Des causes du rire,” 1862. Chapter on 
“Le risible” in “La Theorie scientifique de la sensibilite,” 1877. 

Page 159 

Oswald Kiilpe: “Outlines of Psychology,” sec. 23, p. 14. See 
also p. 89. 

Page 160 

James Sully: “Essay on Laughter,” chap. Ill, pp. 50-65, 1902. 

Page 161 

Lillien J. Martin: See note to p. 143. 

H. L. Hollingsworth: “Experimental Studies in Judgment; 
Judgments of the Comic,” Psychological Review , March, 1911. 

Page 163 

“Dasarupa”: Translated by George C. O. Haas. 

“Sahitya Darpana”: Translated by Ballantyne and Mitra. 

William Hazlitt: “On Wit and Humor.” 


252 


NOTES AND REFERENCES 


Page 165 

“1475”: The date of the first quotation given in Murray’s 
New English Dictionary. 

Page 166 

“In the century following Shakespeare”: Murray’s Dictionary 
dates the use of humor in the sense of the laughable or jocose 
from 1682. 

Page 169 

Carlyle: “Essay on Jean Paul Richter.” 

Jean Paul: “Vorschule der iEsthetik,” 1804. 

Page 170 

Aristophanes: See p. 43. 

Rabelais: See p. 18. 

Voltaire: See p. 151. 

Page 171 

Laurence Sterne: “Tristram Shandy,” book IV, chap. XXII. 

Charles Lamb spoke of our enjoyment of “being cheated” as 
the value of a joke (Popular Fallacies, no. IX), and Mark 
Twain seemed to regard “surprise” as the essence of it (“How 
to Tell a Story”). 

Byron: “Don Juan,” canto IV, stanza IV. 

Heine: “Fresko-Sonnette an Christian S.” 
t Hegel: “Philosophy of Fine Art,” translated by F. P. B. 
Osmaston, vol. IV, p. 302. See also Bryant’s briefer translation. 

Page 172 

Sahitya Darpana: See note to p. 163. 

Chr. W. Weisse: “System der iEsthetik,” 1830. See also 
Arnold Ruge, “Neue Vorschule der iEsthetik,” pp. 58-59, 1837. 

Page 173 

Lotze: See note to p. 217. 

M. Lazarus: “Das Leben der Seele,” 1856. 

Page 175 

Herbert Spencer: “The Physiology of Laughter,” in “Essays,” 
vol. II. 


NOTES AND REFERENCES 


253 


Page 176 

Theodor Lipps: “Komik und Humor, Beitrage zur Asthetik,” 
1898. 

Page 179 

“One of Lipps’s critics”: Herckenrath, author of the “Pro- 
blemes d’estetique et de morale,” 1898. 

Page 183 

“Real contribution to the science of humor”: The attempt to 
make a quantitative mechanics of the psychology of feeling, ex- 
emplified in this theory of Lipps, in the article on “Play,” by 
H. A. Carr, based upon H. R. Marshall’s “Pain, Pleasure, and 
^Esthetics” (see note to p. 12), and also in H. Heath Bawden’s 
article on the comic (see note to p. 157), expresses a pious scien- 
tific aspiration, and I have no desire to judge of its value in 
general. But since in so far as it relates to humorous pleasures, 
it ignores, rather than explains, their essential qualitative differ- 
ence, it can be dismissed here as nothing in its present simplicity 
but an aspiration. 


Page 185 

Alexander Bain: “The Emotions and the Will,” chap. XIV. 

Charles Renouvier: “La nouvelle monadologie,” note 73 to 
part IV. 

Page 186 

A. Penjon: “Le Rire et la Liberte,” Revue Philosophique, vol. 
XXXVI, August, 1893. 

John Dewey: “The Theory of Emotion,” Psychological Review , 
beginning November, 1894. See also the article of H. Heath 
Bawden (note to p. 157) for a mature statement of the liberty 
theory. Sir Arthur Mitchell, in a book on “Dreaming, Laughing, 
and Blushing,” went so far with the liberty theory as to describe 
laughter as “a state of mental disorder.” Giulio A. Levi, on 
the other hand, in “II Comico” (1913), declares that we enjoy 
the comic because in that moment of freedom from the disci- 
pline of ends and interests we recognize the ethical reality of 
our persons. 


254 NOTES AND REFERENCES 

Page 187 

The quotation is from “The Psychology of Humor,” an article 
by L. W. Kline, American Journal of Psychology , October, 1907. 

Page 188 

“Hegel’s wisdom”: See also in the American Journal of Psy- 
chology, April, 1911, Horace M. Kallen’s article on “The Authen- 
tic Principle in Comedy.” He describes comedy as “a relation 
in which we are harmoniously and completely adapted to what 
is in itself a disharmony, a maladjustment.” 

Page 190 

Sigmund Freud: “Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Un- 
bewussten,” 1905. Translated into English by A. A. Brill. 

Page 206 

Lactantius: “The Divine Institutes,” book III, chap. X. 

Darwin: “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Ani- 
mals,” chap. VIII. 

Page 211 

L. Joubert: See p. 139. 


Page 213 

Descartes: See note to p. 141. Descartes explained the laugh 
as due to the suddenness with which these two passions are 
aroused, causing the blood to rush from the right chamber of 
the heart into the lungs, and so forcing the air out in a gust. 

Page 214 

Moses Mendelssohn: “Philosophische Schriften,” vol. II, 
p. 23. 

Lessing: “Laocoon,” 23. 

“Humor is the kiss”: The quotation is from F. Baldensperger, 
who so describes this phase of German literature in his essay on 
“Les definitions de l’humour,” Etudes d’Histoire Litteraire, first 
series. 


NOTES AND REFERENCES 


255 


Page 215 

Goethe: Maximen und Reflexionen, 13. 

Novalis: “Schriften,” Verlag. von G. Reimer, Berlin, 1837, 
vol. II, p. 223. 

Theodor Vischer: “iEsthetik,” 1846. 

Page 217 

K. W. F. Solger: “ Erwin, vier Gespraehe iiber das Schone und 
die Kunst,” 1815. Also “Vorlesungen iiber iEsthetik,” 1829. 

Bohtz: “Ueber das Komische und die Komodie,” p. 75, 1844. 

Moritz Carri&re: “iEsthetik,” 1859, p. 197 of the second edi- 
tion. 

Hermann Lotze: “Geschichte der iEsthetik in Deutschland/’ 
book II, chaps. IV and V, 1868. 

Page 218 

Julius Bahnsen: “Das Tragische als Weltgesetz und der 
Humor als asthetische Gestalt des Metaphysischen,” 1877. For 
an account of this book and of those of Weisse and Zeising I am 
indebted to a little volume by Doctor Franz Jahn entitled “Das 
Problem des Komischen in seiner geschichtlichen Entwicklung.” 

Ewald Hecker: “Physiologie und Psychologie des Lachens 
und des Komischen/’ 1873. In Kant’s “Critique of Judgment” 
(see note to p. 153) the idea of an “oscillation” of the attention 
in comic states is also introduced, and related in some cumber- 
some way to the rhythmic motions of laughter. 

Page 221 

“Point of a joke”: See also “Neue Vorschule der iEsthetik,” 
by Arnold Ruge, and “A Syllabus of Lectures on the Psychology 
of Pain and Pleasure,” by Benjamin Ives Gilman, American 
Journal of Psychology , October, 1893. 

Emil Kraepelin: “Zur Psychologie des Komischen,” in Wundt’s 
“Philosophische Studien,” II, p. 128, and p. 327, 1886. 

Wundt: “Grundziige der physiologischen Psychologie,” 4th 
edition, vol. II, p. 249. Also p. 607, where he still suggests a 
connection between this oscillation and the rhythmic motions 
of laughter. 


256 


NOTES AND REFERENCES 


Page 224 

Malebranche: “The Search after Truth/’ 1674. 

Page 225 

The Definition of Instinct: In James Drever’s “Instinct in 
Man” the history and contemporary status of this concept is 
fully set forth. 

Page 226 

“Humor is an element”: Since I have quoted Bernard Shaw 
in opposition to the idea of this book, I must quote further his 
unconscious indorsement of its thesis. I had already written 
this sentence when his letter came, stating that “Humor is an 
element, not a product nor a compound. It makes you laugh: 
that is how you detect its presence. Dirt, cruelty, disaster are 
rich in it; happiness and generosity abound in it; mere folly ab- 
sorbs it freely; it attaches itself to every kind of event with com- 
plete moral indifference, having no sort of bias one way or 
another between the adventures of Saint Francis and those of 
Mr. Charles Chaplin.” 

Page 227 

“So early and so spontaneously”: James Drever adds this to 
McDougall’s three tests of the primary instincts. 

“Their gift of laughter”: Freud says that “The child lacks all 
feeling for the comic,” but it is evident that he derived this 
opinion from his theory of the comic and not from his observa- 
tions of children. A contrary opinion is expressed by Harald 
Hoff ding in his “Outlines of Psychology” and by Stephen S. 
Colvin in an article on “The Educational Value of Humor” in 
the Pedagogical Seminary , vol. 14, no. 4, December, 1907. I 
think those people themselves are a little too grown-up, or per- 
haps they were born grown-up, who cannot see humor in the 
eyes of children, and by some slight play of memory and imagi- 
native sympathy know how comic are the things at w T hich they 
laugh. 

Page 231 

Lipps: See p. 176. 

G. Stanley Hall: See note to p. 132. 


NOTES AND REFERENCES 


257 


Darwin: “Descent of Man/’ p. 71. 

G. J. Romanes: “Animal Intelligence,” p. 444. 

Leon Dumont: See note to p. 157. 

Page 232 

C. Lloyd Morgan: “Animal Life and Intelligence,” p. 406. 

Page 234 

Jose Ingegnieros: “Le rire hysterique,” Journal de Psychologie, 
vol. 3, 1906, p. 501. 

Binet Sangle: Revue Scientifique, March 2, 1901. For further 
bibliography see Victor Robinson’s “Essay on Hasheesh,” pub- 
lished by The Medical Review of Reviews , New York, 1912. 











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